Blatty confirms changes to the 40th Anniversary edition of The Exorcist novel

William Peter Lucas?

The following “Author’s Note” by Blatty has appeared in The Ninth Configuration Website and is perhaps worth reprinting here:

 ”In January 1968, I  rented cabin in Lake Tahoe to start writing

 a novel about demonic possession that I’d been
thinking  about

 for many years. I‘d been driven to it,
actually: I was a writer of

 comic novels and farcical screenplays such as A Shot  in the Dark

 with almost all of my income derived from films; but
because the

 season for “funny”  had abruptly turned dry and no studio would

 hire me for anything non-comedic, I had reached
James Thurber’s

 stage of desperation when, as he wrote in a
“Preface to His Life,”

 comedy writers sometimes take to “calling
their home from their

 office, or their office from their home,
asking for themselves, and

 then hanging up in hard-breathing relief upon
beingtold they

 “weren’t in.’” My breaking point came, I
suppose, when at the Van

  Nuys, California, unemployment office I
spotted my movie agent

  in a
line three down from mine. And so the cabin in Tahoe where I

 was destined to become the caretaker in
Stephen King’s terrifying

 The
Shining, typing my version of “All work and no play makes

 Jack a dull boy” hour after hour, day after
day for over six weeks as

 I kept changing , the date in my opening  paragraph from “April 1”

 to April something else, because each time I
would read the page

 aloud, the rhythm of the lines seemed to
change, a maddening

 cycle of emptiness and insecurity –-
magnified, I suppose, by the

 fact that I had no clear plot for the novel in
mind –  that continued

 until I at last gave up the cabin  and hoped for better luck back

 “home,” a clapboard raccoon-surrounded  guest house in the hills

 of 
Encino owned by a former Hungarian opera star who had

 purchased the property from the luminous film
actress, Angela

 Lansbury, and where  I overcame the block by realizing  that I was

 starting the novel in the wrong place –
namely, the Georgetown

 section of Washington, D.C., as opposed to
northern Iraq. Almost a

 year later I completed a first draft of the
novel. At the request of my

 editors at Harper and Row, I did make two  quick changes: cleaning

 up Chris MacNeil’s potty mouth, and  making the ending “less obvious.” But because of a dire financial circumstance,
I had not another day to devote to the manuscript, so that when I
received a life-saving offer to adapt Calder Willingham’s novel Providence Island for the screen for Paul Newman’s film company,
I instantly accepted and left my novel to find its fate. For most of these
past forty years I have rued

 not having done a thorough second draft and
careful polish of the

 dialogue and prose. But now, like an answer to
a prayer, this
 fortieth anniversary 
of the novel  has given me not
only the
 opportunity to do another draft,  but to do it at a time in my life
 –- I will be
84 this coming January — when it might not be totally
unreason nable to hope that my 
abilities, such as they are, have at least somewhat improved, and for all of this I say, Deo gratias!               — William Peter Blatty

Well, Blatty should give the novel a date.
There are too manny things that have changed since he wrote the novel.
The medical procedures.
Police Investigations.
Iraq.
Denning’s movie.
The astronaut.
The ignorance concerning satanic rituals and possession.
Just “Georgetown-1971″ would be fine.

hi yours as obseesed as me lol

No one ever suggests that we update Dicken’s novels just because the times have changed.  I am always very skeptical when an artist changes a seminal work after decades have already passed.