RE: Legion By: William Peter Blatty
A Book that I Just Finished
From: Travis
November 19, 2020
So, I don't know if you noticed, but we recently finished reading through The Exorcist on the podcast. It's probably sitting over in the main-attraction section just a bit to the left of this paragraph. To reduce the experience to a single line: we all thought it was an interesting super natural read. To expand a little past that, I think we were also a bit surprised to find that right there in the middle of our spooky possession story was an episode of Columbo and a murder investigation headed by a Detective Kinderman.
Seeing as we all more or less liked the book (see above), I decided to jump in on the sequel, Legion, and once again (although maybe a little less surprisingly) was met by our favorite Peter Faulk stand-in, Detective K, and again was a bit surprised at just how much the story focused on gumshoe detective work rather than, I don't know, fighting demons and stuff. I went in expecting another supernatural ordeal, perhaps focusing on a new traumatized youngster, afflicted again by the unfairly maligned Pazuzu, but what I got was a Zodiac killer slash Silence of the Lambs affair, narrated chiefly by our movie-loving detective, now deep, deep in his own mind, guidelessly trying to unwind the secrets of existence in a rambling, wide-ranging internal monologue.
Some familiar faces return - we sit in on a couple man dates between the detective and Father Dyer; we nod solemnly at poor Father Karras' grave; we think back with a chill to the events with young Reagan - but this story centers around a serial killer, calling him/herself 'Gemini' (see? it's related to the Zodiac) who has resurfaced after several years of dormancy and Detective K is once again on the case.
As previously mentioned, Kinderman spends a fair bit of the first half of the book alternating between: talking to himself about god and the universe (I guess still shaken by the questions raised from the exorcism twelve years back); conversing with people in a series of non-sequitur, top-of-mind questions and discussion threads; forcing everyone he's with to eat something (like any good jewish mother would); and still surreptitiously carrying out his investigations all the while.
I'd like to avoid getting too much into the plot points, because I fear discussing in much depth would quickly get into spoilers. Suffice it to say along the way, for various reasons, we meet a lot of doctors, nurses, and staff working at the Georgetown General Hospital. We once again delve into the terror that can surround medical procedures, the horror of the human mind in the midst of sickness; but this exploration feels a bit more diffuse than the last go around (this story lacking a central figure, a Regan, to focus these issues) and we seem to be much more in the realm of the criminal than the profane.
I will also say that the first half or so, featuring Kinderman ping-ponging from one place, one discussion, one internal dialogue to the next was not very effective for me. When I didn't feel lost, I wondered what exactly we were building to. I'm willing to suggest that I might not've been giving the book the full attention it deserved; that I missed some obvious hints (it wouldn't be the first time, and thinking about it now, I guess some of these random musings were probably set up as radar pings for the reader) either way, I was disengaged at first. When Blatty started revealing his hand, though, I hadn't been expecting what he showed me and right around that point I felt that the book got its hooks in me... but then, as the whole thing wrapped up, I felt less of the satisfying recognition of a well-placed twist and felt more simply misdirected, told emphatically to look behind me but without the requisite 'tah-dah!' that good sleight of hand should have.
It is a relatively short book -- so I'd say if you've previously enjoyed The Exorcist, you would probably get at least a little enjoyment out of this one too. It's not really something you can pick up on it's own, though, and if you weren't feeling the last installment, I fear this book would fall completely flat.