Worth listening but

I enjoyed this enough to listen to it fully twice, and some things as a hardcore Exorcist fan I genuinely did not even know. However, there's a lot of information that was not included. One of the most important missing bits of trivia was regarding The Exorcist TV series. Blatty would visit the set of the series, and expressed not only excitement but gave the script of Season 1 his full blessing. While he did not contribute to the story directly, he did share a few ideas with the director. The series season 1 is the only continuation Blatty has ever given his full blessing towards, and hasn't mocked nor ridiculed it. Even when the 3 film deal with Blumhouse was made public, he would express his dissatisfaction and make fun of it. No other Exorcist franchise not written by Blatty himself has ever gotten his blessing, except for the Season one of the Prime series. For this reason, I consider it canon. The audiobook also fails to mention, Ti West directed a few episodes for the series.

There's also a very biased opinion repeated throughout the audiobook about the ending of the original Exorcist. We all know Blatty wanted everyone to know the devil did not win in the end. But to share my (very unpopular) opinion; the events of the tv series prove the McNeils definitely did not have a happy ending but instead were broken apart as a family and The Exorcist III: Legion story by Blatty himself tells us Father Karras was not only resurrected by the devil himself, but punished by having his body possessed by the Gemini killer for a full decade and half, having to witness his own hands torture and kill innocent people. So, objectively: who got a good ending?

It would've also been nice to mention the fact that Pazuzu, the demon who possessed Reagan (twice), is an actual demon from Babylonian times and he was considered one of the strongest demons who actually fought off other demons with ease. Pregnant women would have Pazuzu statues and icons everywhere to ward off other evil demons back in those days. This is why the exorcism fails, because he is one of the original demons in our history, and he has dominion over most others. This is also why there is no importance put over the demons name in the original film, because Merrin already knew who he was facing and the traditional methods do not work on someone who is considered to be a King of demons. Karras alone attempts to find the demon's name, but Father Merrin has no interest due to all of the above.

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