Blatty, William Peter - Blatty, William Peter 1928–
Blatty, William Peter 1928–
American novelist and screenwriter, author of John Goldfarb, Please Come Home! and The Exorcist. (See also Contemporary Authors, Vols. 5-8, rev. ed.)
I consumed The Exorcist as if it were a bottomless bag of popcorn. It's a page-turner par excellence. I variously believed, discredited and respected The Exorcist. Blatty writes and thinks sophisticated. His little Regan MacNeil, daughter of a divorced actress living in Washington, D.C., is no spontaneous successor-sibling to Rosemary's baby (the inevitable and faulty comparison). Blatty takes Regan and us through neurology, psychiatry and common sense before turning her over to a Teilhardlike Jesuit philosopher-paleontologist and a Hamlet-like Jesuit psychiatrist who conduct an exorcism….
Faulkner, Blatty is not. But Poe and Mary Shelley would recognize him as working in their ambiguous limbo between the natural and the...
[The entire page is 1135 words long]
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