群魔 (1983)

Legion is a 1983 horror novel by American writer William Peter Blatty. A sequel to The Exorcist, it also involves demonic possession and was adapted for the film The Exorcist III in 1990. 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:

Jesus asked him, saying, "What is your name?" And he said, "Legion", because many devils had entered him. (Luke 8:30)

The more common quotation of the incident, sometimes called the Gerasene Demoniac, comes from The Gospel of Mark:

And he asked him, "What is thy name?" And he answered, saying, "My name is Legion: for we are many". (Mark 5:9)

Premise

The storyline of the novel mixes horror and whodunnit. Police Lieutenant Bill Kinderman (a returning character from The Exorcist), 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.

Kinderman entertains philosophical thoughts, trying for instance to work out how the concept of evil relates to God's plans for humanity. 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.

Plot summary

A twelve-year-old boy is murdered and crucified on a pair of rowing oars. Kinderman already sees that he is mutilated in a way identical to the victims of the Gemini Killer, a serial killer who was apparently shot to death by police fifteen years previously while climbing the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. A priest is later murdered in a confessional, once again bearing the mutilations distinctive of the killer. The fingerprints at the two crime scenes differ, however. Further victims soon follow, including one of Kinderman's friends, Father Dyer, who is slain in a hospital by draining his body of blood. Yet again the Gemini Killer's mutilations are present.

Investigations lead Kinderman to the psychiatric wing of the hospital where his friend was slain. Here he finds suspects:

Dr. Freeman Temple – a psychiatrist who has a contemptuous attitude towards his patients.

Dr. Vincent Amfortas – he is not very talkative, and seemingly apathetic toward everything since the recent death of his wife.

Patients – there are elderly people at the hospital with senile dementia. The fingerprints of different senile patients are found at murder scenes, but interviews with them make it clear they are seemingly incapable of carrying out the elaborate crimes.

James Vennamun – the actual Killer himself, whose body was never found, suggesting that he may have survived and resumed his crimes.

Tommy Sunlight – a patient, believed by Kinderman to be Damien Karras, a priest who supposedly died in The Exorcist by falling down a flight of stairs. He was found wandering aimlessly eleven years before, dressed as a priest. He brags of being James reincarnated and of having carried out the recent murders despite being secured in a locked cell in a straitjacket. At one point he claims the doctors and nurses let him out to kill.

Sunlight eventually tells Kinderman that the demon from the earlier novel aided him to possess the body of Damien Karras after the latter's death in an act of revenge for having been driven out of the little girl. Sunlight spent many years trying to gain control of the body, which had suffered from injuries, during which time Karras was held in a mental hospital. He lacked any identification and was nicknamed Sunlight because he sat in the sun's rays as it passed through the window of his cell. Upon gaining control of Karras' body, the Gemini occasionally left it to possess the bodies of the patients with senile dementia, and as they were in an open ward with access to the outside world, he could use them to go out and commit murders. Thus the fingerprints of senility patients were found at the crime scenes; their bodies carried out the murders, but the Gemini was in control of them.

The Gemini's motive originally was to shame his hated father, a preacher. When his father dies of natural causes, the Gemini feels his mission is over and he has no reason to remain in possession of Karras' body. Feeling compelled to explain everything to Kinderman, he summons the detective and succeeds in demanding that Kinderman tell him he believes he, Sunlight, really is the Gemini. He then wills himself to die from heart failure.

Dr. Temple suffers a stroke and ends up mentally disabled. Dr. Amfortas dies in a home accident after being repeatedly terrorized by a possible evil Doppelgänger of himself (although he was terminally ill in any case, from a disease he refused to treat so that he could join his deceased wife).

Kinderman later visits a burger bar with his faithful partner Atkins. Kinderman explains to Atkins his thoughts and musings on the case and how it relates to his problem of the concept of evil. Kinderman concludes that he believes the Big Bang was Lucifer falling from heaven, and that the entire universe, including humanity, are the broken parts of Lucifer, and that evolution is the process of Lucifer putting himself back together as an angel.