Primary configuration: William Peter Blatty’s “The Ninth Configuration”.

I finally got to read Blatty’s “The Ninth Configuration” and earlier tonight I have completed it!

The story here is set in a top-secret installation that is dubbed by the Pentagon as Center 18. Residing inside Center 18 are twenty-seven military men, all of them decorated officers and heroes. But these men are gripped in madness with hope eluding them.

Then one day a psychiatrist is assigned to the Installation, a certain Colonel Kane. Kane is haunted by some form of guilt as holds the inmates in a powerful and strange power. But slowly he begins to lose control over a murderous demon that he is keeping locked up.

And all round the inmates there gathers the forces of faith and fury. Of a kind of obsessive evil, and also a soul piercing terror that rages.

This novel is quite a departure from his 1971 work “The Exorcist”, as it focuses on the the questions about the existence of god. And it is also a rework, that was spurred on by the success of the previous book, of an earlier novel of his from 1966 titled “Twinkle, Twinkle, “Killer” Kane”. While it isn’t the horror of both “The Exorcist” and “Legion” and it isn’t as long, it is still very good as a thriller.

The story has a very suspensefule undercurrent that runs through it. And it even has some comical moments that pop up every now and then. This will certainly go down as one of my favorite thriller novels.

by i-the-muso-1968