Kinderman already sees that the boy is mutilated in a way identical to the victims of a serial killer known as the Gemini Killer, who was apparently shot to death by police fifteen years previously while climbing the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. The story opens with the discovery of a twelve-year-old boy who has been murdered and crucified on a pair of rowing oars. Kinderman often alludes to his own favorite novel, Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, and both Shakespeare and Nietzsche influence the dialogues between him and a mysterious patient. Kinderman entertains philosophical thoughts, trying for instance to work out how the concept of evil relates to God's plans for Humanity. There Kinderman begins to find links between the victims and events in the previous novel, the exorcism of the twelve-year-old girl, Regan.
Kinderman's investigations lead him to a mental asylum, where there are a number of suspects, including a psychiatrist and one of his patients. The slayings have a blasphemous side to them, including a child being crucified and a priest's beheading. A police detective, Lieutenant Kinderman, investigates a series of murders that have all the hallmarks of a long dead serial killer who was shot by police the body was never recovered.
The storyline of the novel mixes horror and whodunnit. The more common quotation of the incident, sometimes called the Gerasene Demoniac, comes from The Gospel of Mark:Īnd he asked him, "What is thy name?" And he answered, saying, "My name is Legion: for we are many". Jesus asked him, saying, "What is your name?" And he said, "Legion", because many devils had entered him (Luke 8:30). The Gospel of Luke describes Jesus traveling in the land of Gadarenes, where he encounters a man possessed by demons: Blatty based aspects of the Gemini Killer on the real life Zodiac Killer, who in a January 1974 letter to the San Francisco Chronicle had praised the original Exorcist film as "the best satirical comedy that I have ever seen". The book was the focus of a court case over its exclusion from The New York Times Best Seller list. Like The Exorcist, it involves demonic possession. It was adapted for the film The Exorcist III in 1990. Legion is a 1983 horror novel by American writer William Peter Blatty, a sequel to The Exorcist.
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