Legion

Legion is a 1983 horror novel by American writer William Peter Blatty, a sequel to The Exorcist. It was adapted for the film The Exorcist III in 1990. Like The Exorcist, it involves demonic possession. The book was the focus of a court case over its exclusion from The New York Times Best Seller list. 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". Title The title is derived from the Bible. The Gospel of Luke describes Jesus traveling in the land of Gadarenes, where he encounters a man possessed by demons: The more common quotation of the incident, sometimes called the Gerasene Demoniac, comes from The Gospel of Mark: Premise The storyline of the novel mixes horror and whodunnit. 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 slayings have a blasphemous side to them, including a child being crucified and a priest's beheading. Kinderman's investigations lead him to a mental asylum, where there are a number of suspects, including a psychiatrist and one of his patients. There Kinderman begins to find links between the victims and events in the previous novel, the exorcism of the twelve-year-old girl, Regan.