Fergus, Quondam Happy Face's Reviews > The Exorcist

I didn’t become a Christian until my early 30s. Went Southern Baptist tho I am an Indiana transplant in Houston.

I saw the Exorcist while an atheist-agnostic rock n roller at Purdue.
It scared me terribly.
I was all about the secular world and didn’t want any spirits around, good or bad.
The fact this story had an element of truth is what made it sink in.
I still remember in freshman dorm at Purdue in 1973-74 that i coul hear a neighboring room playing the movie soundtrack tune Tubular Bells off the Mike Oldham album. It creeped me out again.

A powerful piece of art but I want nothing to do with it.
One of my wifes friend helped in an exorcism on a young girl once, this is real stuff.
Steer clear, there is a war going on.

Tubular Bells! Gosh, I had forgotten how their rendition seared my fragile soul - ty Davy. Yeah, they were ugly days. JFK and Camelot were no more. Tricky Dicky was then at the helm, guiding our fate, yikes!

But Davy, their is a wonderful book by A.W. Tozer called I Talk Back to the Devil (see my review). At a certain point of my life, strangled by daemons, that’s what I started to do! It worked. I once again, so many years after this book, I see the world coolly and objectively - with a CHRISTIAN Lens.

You probably don't want me to start in on the JFK coup, but I strongly feel the same "Deep State" crowd that killed him and got away with it, still run things in the background. Of course, it is different faces but the same dynamics.
LBJ did some good things but was dastardly.
I am reading Massacre at Fall Creek by Jessamyn West because it is based on a true story that took place in the county adjacent to where I was born and raised. White men tried and convicted for killing 7 indians in 1824. I think I had ancestors paternal and maternal in the area at about that time. I am in SAR through some of them.
Anyway, i googled West and she left Indiana when she was about 8 for California. Much like James Dean did [from my hometown]. Dean returned to live with family when his Mom died, West never got her physical hoosier on again
She was a second cousin to Dick Nixon on the Milhous line, oddly enough. Wikapedia says she got her socialist political leanings at least partially from listening to Dick Nixon's Dads sermons. There was a lot of Quakerism in that area, some in my family, and you probably heard about in Nixon's family. Kind of ironic but LBJ handed him that Vietnamese hot potato and he was in a very un-Quaker like decision making scenario. Dean was a Fairmount Quaker, I was a county-seater Marion Giant. He was my parents age, died the year I was born. The Dad of the family next door was his first cousin and I partied with one of his boys. Stones etc on 8 track, 12 pack of Busch Bavarian, Columbian redbud and maybe some fresh ears of pilfered sweet corn.

I remember being told to watch out for the boogey man alot when I was a kid. Especially by my Dads Mom.
I had scary dreams of a man made of actual boogers for a few years, i think from these warnings being in my sub-concious.
I finally buckled myself up to it and then I stood up to the dream boogey man in my next dream and he never came back.
Don't think I need to read that book you mentioned, but if things change and i come under attack I know where to look. Thanks.
Aren't you mostly Canadian? If so, are you more familiar with politics up there?
I dont wanna sound weak but I enjoyed watching that Canadian stuff like Anne of Green Gables.

Wow, Davy, the sheer inhibiting power of my meds would never for an instant allow me to live my life with the intensity with which you have lived yours. I guess I am very lucky to have had a Dad with a PhD in science who understood medical chemistry and biology.

So when, at age 19, I was yanked completely clear of the chaos of that era through pharmaceutical means, I was lucky.

I have lived the disaster of our times at arm's length.

Lately shielded from terror - and my own daemons - by my meds, I became much like Peter Sellers playing the dumb Chance the Gardener (in Being There). Safely sequestered in a bureaucratic job all my life (though it was a half life) I searched for my answers in my spare time and found them all in my books!

At 74, scratch the surface of my thinking and you'll find an ingenuous, happy kid (thanks to my Dad's alertness in 1969!).

Having said that... Some days are good for me, some not. But I see from your words that your sensitivity to the Exorcist is no accident!

Excellent review and the scariest, move evil novel I have ever read in my life!

Well, I thought a distanced - and even rather boring - review was the only way I, still scared fifty years later, could handle it. Sorta like lab technicians handle radioactive isotopes in a shielded enclosure!

Great review. It is definitely a page turner!

Excellent review

Thanks so much, folks! The seventies were tumultuous times for all those who lived through them - a time of massive upheaval and casting away of behavioural norms. So this book defined our age - an age of lost innocence amid new and horrid evils!

In one of my TBR piles.

Oh, Laura, you’ve just GOT to read it to add sheer pathos to your movie experience!

How about the Amityville Horror? It was so scary I closed the doors in my room when reading it to prevent a surprise attack from a fictional intruder 😅

Never saw it. Maybe I'm one of the lucky few, then!