In contrast to Rosemary’s Baby, both The Other and The Exorcist are overwritten. Tryon delivers an afternoon “spread lavishly, like a picnic on a cloth of light and shade,” and Blatty begins his book, “Like the brief doomed flare of exploding suns that registers dimly on blind men’s eyes, the beginning of the horror passed almost unnoticed.” But Blatty writes excellent dialogue and he believes deeply in his material. For his part, Tryon underplays the horror so that it sneaks up on the reader, emerging from a thicket of epic-poetic descriptions of nature. By the time you’re ambushed by Tryon’s
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