Blatty’s 1999 Exorcist Foreword

I’m a fan of internet auctions and the rare treasures they can uncover. That is why eBay is an often-clicked bookmark in my browser (and subsequent dent in the wallet). Couple this with my strange need to own many copies of The Exorcist novel (17 so far, and counting) and you can understand how thrilled I was to find this edition recently.

More rare than you might think, this 1999/2000 reprint actually features the FILM’s cover art and coincided with the release of The Version You’ve Never Seen. The real treat is the foreword provided by William Peter Blatty on his classic novel.

I thought it might be nice to share with Exorcist fans, so I have ignored the copyright page of the book (shhhh!) and typed it out for those who haven’t read it before:

It is sometimes hard for me to believe that almost thirty years ago I was living in a one-room cottage and eating most of my meals standing up as I attempted to write a novel of demonic possession, at the time an obscure and little spoken of phenomenon. I was convinced such things did occur. The task, in order for the novel to work, was to convince the reader – to transmute the incredible into the credible. When the book was first published in the US, it seemed I had failed. The public showed no interest. As I toured to promote it in city after city the publisher’s representative would greet me at the airport – in some cases with an eerily cheery manner, I must say – with the report that such and such a department store had just ‘returned their 100 copies’. Then by some smiling twist fate, while in the midst of a disconsolate lunch in New York City, my publisher telephoned to tell me a guest on the Dick Cavett television show – at the time the most influential in America – had at the last minute fallen out. As I was literally only two minutes away from the studio – and therefore the only person who could possibly get there in time – I’d been tapped to fill in. I raced to the studio and into makeup. Normally, the ‘author’s spot’ is no more than six minutes at the very end of the show. But each of the two guests before me were abruptly deemed to be – well – unstimulating, let us say. And suddenly there was almost an entire show to be done and nowhere to turn but to me. As Mr Cavett had not read the novel, I was allowed to do a forty-five minute monologue about it. The book hit the lists within the next ten days. And went on, it seems. And so what was the difference between a book’s utter obscurity, forever, and a strange life that goes on to this day? ‘That you weren’t in the loo when the call to the restaurant came’, the cynic might reply. But not I. I believe, with all my heart, that Someone, somehow, arranges things.

Yes, as I said, it’s all hard to believe.

But I do.

William Peter Blatty
June 1999