[The following is an entry I wrote for Magill's Encylopedia of Literature; see also ]

An ancient Assyrian demon possesses an eleven-year-old child in 1970 America, engaging two Jesuit priests in a confrontation between good and evil as they attempt to exorcise the spirit

Author: William Peter Blatty (1928- )

Subgenre: Fantasy--theological romance

Type of work: Novel

Time of Plot: 1970

Location: Northern Iraq and Washington, D.C.

First published: 1971

The Plot: After finishing an archaeological dig in ancient Nineveh, Jesuit priest Lankester Merrin prepares to leave Iraq and return to the United States. A strange premonition, however, fills the elderly priest as he sifts through the recently collected artifacts and discovers an amulet bearing the head of Pazuzu, a demon of sickness and disease. 

Merrin leaves for home with an "icy conviction that soon he would face an ancient enemy." Meanwhile, in Washington D.C., movie star and recently divorced mother Chris MacNeil has rented a home across the street from Georgetown University, where she is filming a movie. As she lies in bed preparing her lines for the following day, she hears strange rapping sounds emerging from somewhere in the house. Other strange events soon occur, the most serious being her daughter Regan's change in personality. Having found a Ouija board in the basement of the house, the eleven-year-old girl has contacted a "playmate" called Captain Howdy, who now physically abuses her. 

Medical tests prove futile in explaining Regan's emerging violent behavior, and her mother remains unconvinced by psychiatric speculations; she knows that the "thing" in her daughter's room is not Regan. Although she professes no religious belief, she solicits the aid of a young Jesuit priest, Damien Karras--who is also a psychiatrist--and begs for an exorcism. Karras, tormented by a loss of faith and guilt due to his indigent mother's recent death, agrees to see the child in a medical capacity but doubts the possibility of possession. Events soon convince him otherwise; the demon, speaking through Regan's emaciated body in a groaning, horrific voice, evinces knowledge of his mother's death and intones an unknown language, which Karras tape-records. 

After having the tape analyzed, the priest learns that the language is in fact English--backwards--wherein the personality confesses to be "No one," claims to fear "the priest," and repeats the word "Merrin" several times. Karras receives permission for an exorcism, but the Bishop of the diocese insists that a man with experience perform it; Karras may assist. Lankester Merrin, now at Woodstock Seminary in Maryland, receives the telegram without opening it, knowing what it requests of him. The demon awaits his arrival; as the elderly priest enters the house, an unearthly voice booms out "Merriiiiinnnnnn!" from the child's bedroom. 

The exorcism commences immediately, but the cunning demon attacks Karras's guilt over his mother's lonely death, and Merrin is forced to send him from the room. Upon returning, Karras finds the elderly priest dead from an apparent heart attack and the demon laughing in victory. In a fit of rage, Karras attacks the possessed body of Regan, daring the demon to enter him, which it does. But the demonic transference is punctuated by a brief moment of lucidity, in which the priest finds his lost faith and exorcises the demon's power by hurling himself through the second-floor window to his death. Regan is saved and, as she physically recovers, remembers nothing of her ordeal.

Analysis: Based on a reported case of demonic possession in the Washington D.C. area in 1949, William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist (1971) was the second of four novels, all of which examine the question of evil. The Exorcist appeared four years after Ira Levin's Rosemary's Baby (1967), a work whose subject was also demonic terror. Together these books revitalized the fantasy-horror genre, and, with few exceptions, remain the most literate and frightening works of the past twenty-five years. 

While both books were instant best-sellers and adapted into equally popular movies, the distinction between Blatty's novel and that of Levin's remains noteworthy, for The Exorcist is no horrific account of devil worship. On the contrary, it presents a deeply religious affirmation of life within a modern-day "psychomachia," or the warfare between good and evil for possession of a soul. That warfare, however, has changed significantly in a post-Freudian world that has redefined the soul and, more importantly, what constitutes evil. The damnation of Regan is never at issue: her body and the ensuing exorcism merely provide the opportunity for the demon's confrontation with men of faith, especially the exorcist Lankester Merrin, with whom it has previously battled and lost. 

In a secularized "God is dead" world, that confrontation appears grotesquely nostalgic: good and evil have apparently lost all clarity, with humanity now assuming the prerogatives of Satan. Blatty situates this modern psychomachia in a new age of faith, one where the rational, scientific mind has for the most part supplanted a theological system of belief and its counterpart, the willful disobedience of God. As the most fully-realized character of the novel, the priest-psychiatrist Damien Karras represents both a servant of God and a learned man of science, a man tormented by guilt who struggles to reconcile providential design with the darker recesses of the human mind. Karras becomes the modern Everyman of the psychomachia, caught between rational experience and irrational faith. 

In attempting to explain why her daughter's illness is a conflict of mind, not a battle with evil, Karras says to MacNeil, "Now imagine that the human body is a massive ocean liner, all right? and that all of your brain cells are the crew. Now one of these cells is up on the bridge. He's the captain. But he never knows precisely what the rest of the crew below decks is doing." Karras goes on to explain that when one cell assumes the command against the captain's wishes, or "waking consciousness," mutiny occurs and dual personality results, to which MacNeil responds: "I think it's almost easier to believe in the devil!" Karras's metaphor modernizes the biblical mutiny that accounts for Satan's fall and the ensuing warfare between good and evil. The unfathomable depths of the human mind, though less easily comprehended, have assumed "supernatural" powers. 

MacNeil's doubts are those of humanity: can evil be reduced to the chaotic intricacies of cells and neurons? Yet the demon's possession of Regan demonstrates for Karras that evil can be a force unto itself. His fatal encounter in the exorcism proves that evil affirms the existence of good, while good posits the reality of evil, and with that knowledge the necessity for faith triumphs.

Wayne Narey