Author
The Exorcist
William Peter Blatty's 1971 novel follows a movie actress living in a rented house in Georgetown, Washington, D.C. She watches her young daughter change from a bright child into someone terrifyingly unrecognizable. Doctors and psychiatrists run out of explanations, and the family eventually turns to the Catholic Church. The Church sends a Jesuit priest who is also a psychiatrist and is struggling with his own faith. Blatty draws on a reported 1949 exorcism case to ask what happens when medicine, skepticism and belief all fail to account for suffering. The book became a huge bestseller and one of the best-known books made into movies, yet it works as a serious, disturbing story about doubt, evil and love as well as a horror landmark.