Martin Kessler, who previously brought books about an immortal centurion and an omnipotent alien god to the podcast, returns to discuss The Ninth Configuration by William Peter Blatty. A reworking of the Exorcist author's 1966 novel Twinkle Twinkle Killer Kane! and basis for his 1980 movie, Configuration is set at Center Eighteen, a military sanitarium in an isolated castle deep in the Washington woods.

Rehearsal for Shakespeare plays starring dogs and the sledgehammering of uncooperative atoms are only some of the routine events witnessed by the new enigmatic head psychiatrist, a man determined to learn why one of the inmates freaked out during a scheduled space mission and refused to go to the moon.

It's a unique and intimate novel full of the kind of theological discourses Blatty explored in all his best-known work. Among other topics, Kessler talks with hosts Christopher Funderburg and John Cribbs about how Blatty's comedy background shaped the tone of the book, the existential horror of dying in space and the problem of the world's smartest dog.

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Intro & outro music by Marcus Pinn of Pinnland Empire.