The Exorcist | Characters
Although sprawling in prose, The Exorcist is a surprisingly tight novel, with relatively few characters. It begins with, and stays centered on, the MacNeil household. The mother, Chris, is an actress, based by Blatty on his friend and onetime neighbor Shirley MacLaine. (After the phenomenal social reaction to the novel, Blatty regretted this, since some people assumed Shirley MacLaine actually had a daughter who had been possessed.) Despite Chris's career, Blatty eschewed the genre conventions of show-business novels; Chris is down to earth, not sexually active, and—other than...
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