William Peter Blatty is best known for his novel The Exorcist, a work widely credited with sparking the explosion of the horror genre in the 1980s. While the cultural impact of the novel is undeniable, analysis of Blatty's work from a critical and literary perspective has until now been lacking. These 13 essays examining The Exorcist and Blatty's other novels mark the first attempt to chart his growth from an author of mediocre comic novels to one of the premier authors of novels about the supernatural. The volume analyzes not only his craft, but also the many layers of psychological, philosophical, literary, historical, theological and autobiographical elements fueling and expressed by the imagination behind a half a century of work.