The Nine Books that inspired me to write (2 of 9) #2_ Legion by William Peter Blatty

Legion (1983)

Long before it became a tourist attraction, Dublin's Temple Bar in the 1980's was a ramshackle collection of dilapidated warehouses, earmarked for demolition. The area was hidden behind a stockade of music postered hoardings. Along the street amid the buildings was a bookshop called The Alchemist's Head (sadly gone now). It was a long, narrow shop with shelves full of fortean magaines. movie magazines and a healthy stack of sci-fi and horror books. Too young to have seen The Exorcist at the cinema (it was the in early days of Beta and VHS, so no-one I knew owned one), I picked up a second-hand copy of Legion for a handome £1. I'm glad I read this first before reading The Exorcist. Its a much better book.

Legion is the second horror book on my list of the 9 books that inspired me to write. It is on one level, a detective novel and a police procedural. But as its the sequel to The Exorcist, there's always going to be a supernatural element to the story.

The protagonist, Lieutenant  William F. Kinderman , a homicide detective, believes the murder of a 12 year old boy is the work of a known serial killer - The Gemini Killer; shot by the police, but whose body was never found. A series of brutal murders in a nearby asylum with Gemini's hallmarks, start to point to a demonic possession with the inmates providing willing hosts to the entity cast out of Father Damian Karras, who kills himself at the end of The Exorcist.

Kinderman is fully realised character, he is a happily married man with a family, a fan of old movies, keeps a paperback in his pocket to read and is approachable. He befriends people easily - I enjoyed the scenes between him and the priest; Jospeh Dyer whose brutal slaying is the turning point in the novel and twists the story out of the noir, hard-boiled crime genre into the horror territory, 

Where the book shines is the pace of the story, layer after layer unfolds without the histrionics and padded out gratuitous tricks of the first book. All the characters in Legion have as Bertold Brecht observes as 'guests', great clearly defined personality traits. Especially the tortured Dr Vincent Amfortas, leaving reel-to-reel recorders running, trying to pick up voices from the ether after the death of his wife.

And gets more than he bargained for.

Blatty, like King, take the 'B'-movie horror out of their books. As Hitchcock once observed, putting ordinary people in extraordinary situations.

The subtle supernatural in Legion was the inspiration of the scene in my book 'Hollow Point', The antagonist, Foucault, a British Nazi supporter who has gained access to a 'dirty' bomb to hit the Tehran conference in 1943 consecrates the device with his acolytes in a satanic ritual. It meant taking a scene and trying to give it the same sort of 'twist' that Blatty achieves in Legion.

Legion is a slim book, but packs plenty of punch and richly steeped in 1970's East Coast America, it is also a rarity in the genre as it is exceptionally well-written, edited and dishes up shocks without lingering on the gore.

 

 

Comments

I read the Exorcist. It was pertty good, if not pretty. Saw the movie (obviously). Can't remember if I read Legion. I'll need to look it out.