Legion (Blatty novel)

Background

Police Lieutenant Bill Kinderman investigates a series of blasphemous murders that carry the marks of the Gemini Killer, a serial killer shot dead by police fifteen years earlier; one of the victims is his friend Father Dyer. The trail leads to the psychiatric wing of a hospital and a patient called Tommy Sunlight, whom Kinderman believes to be Damien Karras, supposedly killed on the stairs in The Exorcist. Sunlight says the demon from the first novel helped the Gemini's spirit into Karras's body after his death, in revenge for being driven out of the girl. Kinderman's thinking about evil and God runs through the book, alongside his love of Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. The title comes from the Bible: in the Gospels of Luke and Mark, a possessed man whom Jesus meets gives his name as Legion. Blatty based aspects of the Gemini Killer on the real Zodiac Killer.