Book Review: The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty
Now, I promise that this isn’t going to become strictly a review blog, but I feel like I need to be posting *some* content and until I know exactly what that will look like, something is better than nothing, right?
Plus, now that we’re in a quarantine, what better way to practice social distancing than reading and watching stuff?
First, I have to get something off of my chest – I had never read The Exorcist before. I had seen the movie, I had watched the TV show, and in general occult/Ouija board horror is one of my favorite subgenre’s and yet, this book just never made it to the top of my To Read pile until this year.
Now I have to get something else off of my chest…I didn’t like it.
I know, I’m sad too, but I just don’t get the hype. Here were my biggest problems:
It was from the POV of Chris – which at first didn’t bother me, but she just continued to annoy me and I didn’t find her to be a very likeable character, so much so that I didn’t care about the plight she was going through.
It was slow moving. The exorcism (you know…the main event of the book) didn’t even start til about 300 pages in.
We didn’t get Reagan’s POV – at all. And I guess the argument could be made that since she was possessed she didn’t have a point of view, but I really wanted to feel her agony. That’s what’s terrifying about possession. But I just didn’t get any of that.
It wasn’t scary. The spiderwalk down the stairs gave me a tiny chill down my spine, but other than that the book wasn’t scary at all. Just full of raunchy “jokes” and gross (but not gory) descriptions.
I wanted more priests. Well, not more priests, just more of them. The most poetic parts of the book were the parts that were from the POV of the priests - and I wanted more of that.
Anyway, I’m sad I didn’t like this book. I feel bad that I didn’t like it. This book has a lot of notoriety. Even people who don’t like horror have heard of this book – and yet, it just didn’t do it for me.here were enough of them.
Have you ever gotten excited to read a popular book in your favorite genre, but it turned out to be disappointing? Share your frustrations in the comments
I promise there will be more content here. There will be more reviews, but also camp nanowrimo is coming up so there will be writing updates, and I am ready to submit a couple of short stories so maybe there will be some publication announcements! One can hope.
That's all for now. Until next time.
B Strong &;