So, speaking of lowering faces into hands… this book induced many facepalms. Blatty is also unusually attached to the rhetorical device of zeugma (“He lowered his face into his hand, and self-doubt”), which, again, draws excessive attention to itself given the frequency with which he uses it. However, the novel has all the failings that I think screenwriter-novelists are prone to: the descriptions are embarrassingly hammy, the dialogue contorts itself into the appearance of cleverness (Chris’ breathless, gee-whiz slanginess may be the worst), characters repeatedly declare their own identities (“As a Jesuit, I…”), there’s an excess of melodramatic sentence fragments and one-sentence paragraphs, etc. Well, this was disappointing! I maintain that The Exorcist has one of the most compelling moral/existential conflicts of any work of media: a priest of failing faith is called in to deal with a horrifying case of putative possession, which may therefore prove the existence of the Devil… and of God?
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