The Exorcist - Softcover

Blatty, William Peter

Softcover

ISBN 10: 006209436X ISBN 13: 9780062094360

Publisher: Harper Paperbacks, 2011

Synopsis

Paperback. Pub Date: 2011 09 Pages: 400 Publisher: Harper Paperbacks Four decades after it first shook the nation. then the world. William Peter Blattys thrilling the Masterwork of Faith and demonic possession returns in an even more powerful Form Raw and profane . shocking and blood-chilling. it remains a modern parable of good and evil and perhaps the most terrifying novel ever written.

About this title

Review

""The Exorcist" is as superior to most books of its kind as an Einstein equation is to an accountant's column of figures.""--New York Times Book Review""Wonderfully exciting.""--Newsweek""Read the book! It's an experience you will never forget.""--St. Louis Post-Dispatch"

From the Author

In January 1968, I rented a cabin in Lake Tahoe,
California, to start work on a novel about demonic
possession that I'd been thinking about for many years.
I`d been driven to it, actually: I was a writer of comic
novels and farcical screenplays such as A Shot in the
Dark with almost all of my income derived from films; but
because the season for "funny" had abruptly turned dry
and no studio would hire me for anything non-comedic, I
had reached James Thurber's fabled stage of desperation
when, as he wrote in a "Preface to His Life," comedy
writers sometimes take to "calling their home from their
office, or their office from their home, asking for
themselves, and then hanging up in hard-breathing relief
upon being informed that they "weren't in." My breaking
point came, I suppose, when at the Van Nuys, California,
unemployment office I spotted my movie agent in a line
three down from mine. And so the cabin in Tahoe where I
was destined to become the caretaker in Stephen King's
terrifying "The Shining," typing my version of "All work
and no play makes Jack a dull boy" hour after hour, day
after day, for over six weeks as I kept changing the date
in my opening paragraph from "April 1" to April something
else, because each time I would read the page aloud, the
rhythm of the lines seemed to change, a maddening cycle
of emptiness and insecurity -- magnified, I suppose, by
the fact that I had no clear plot for the novel in mind --
that continued until I at last gave up the cabin and
hoped for better luck back "home," a clapboard raccoon-
surrounded guest house in the hills of Encino owned by
a former Hungarian opera star who had purchased the
property from the luminous film actress, Angela
Lansbury, and where I finally overcame the block by
realizing that I was starting the novel in the wrong
place, namely the Georgetown section of Washington, D.C.,
as opposed to northern Iraq. Almost a year later I
completed a first draft of the novel. At the request of
my editors at Harper and Row, I did make two quick
changes: cleaning up Chris MacNeil's potty mouth, and
making the ending "less obvious." But because of a dire
financial circumstance, I had not another day to devote
to the manuscript, so that when I received a life-saving
offer to adapt Calder Willingham's novel Providence Island
for the screen for Paul Newman's film company, I virtually
shouted an instant acceptance and left my novel to find
its fate. For most of these past forty years I have rued
not having done a thorough second draft and careful polish
of the dialogue and prose. But now, like an answer to a
prayer, this fortieth anniversary of the novel has given
me not only the occasion to do another draft, but to do
it at a time in my life -- I will be 84 this coming
January -- when it might not be totally unreasonable to
hope that my abilities, such as they are, have at least
somewhat improved, and for all of this I say, Deo gratias!

-- William Peter Blatty

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Paperbacks
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 006209436X
• ISBN 13: 9780062094360
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 400