#BookReview ‘The Institute’ by Stephen King

About the book…

Deep in the woods of Maine, there is a dark state facility where kids, abducted from across the United States, are incarcerated. In the Institute they are subjected to a series of tests and procedures meant to combine their exceptional gifts – telepathy, telekinesis – for concentrated effect.

Luke Ellis is the latest recruit. He’s just a regular 12-year-old, except he’s not just smart, he’s super-smart. And he has another gift which the Institute wants to use…

Far away in a small town in South Carolina, former cop Tim Jamieson has taken a job working for the local Sherriff. He’s basically just walking the beat. But he’s about to take on the biggest case of his career.

Back in the Institute’s downtrodden playground and corridors where posters advertise ‘just another day in paradise’, Luke, his friend Kalisha and the other kids are in no doubt that they are prisoners, not guests. And there is no hope of escape.

But great events can turn on small hinges and Luke is about to team up with a new, even younger recruit, Avery Dixon, whose ability to read minds is off the scale. While the Institute may want to harness their powers for covert ends, the combined intelligence of Luke and Avery is beyond anything that even those who run the experiments – even the infamous Mrs Sigsby – suspect.

Thrilling, suspenseful, heartbreaking, ‘The Institute’is a stunning novel of childhood betrayed and

hope regained.

”You know,Jamieson,this life we think we’re living isn’t real.It’s just a shadow play and I,for one will be glad when the lights go out on it.In the dark,all the shadows disappear.”

Huge thanks to me, from me, for buying a copy of ‘The Institute’, and promptly shelving it to carry on reading King’s older work. Does anyone else do this? Buy an author’s work , whatever subject it is about because they are a life long favourite? And then carry on working through their back catalogue? Or is it just me?

With King, one of the reasons I buy his novels even if I never actually read them as close to publication date as I would like, is because, even when he is not on full throttle(no pun intended), he is still miles ahead of his contemporaries.

His body of work is frankly astonishing, put together, it represents a chronicling of the twentieth century, tipping into the first half of twenty first, and, more specifically, it illustrates the process, if not progress of the American Dream.

Few authors have their ‘origin’ story as well known as King’s,he is as much a cultural icon as his books are.

And in his latest, ‘The Institute’ examines how close we are to an alternate history of the world, how the smallest acts done with little thought, can have massively outreaching consequences.

In this case, Tim Jamieson’s seemingly aimless journey from one existence to another affords him the ability to stick his hand up after boarding a plane, to offer his seat up to someone who needs it more.

This meandering journey that he embarks on, places him firmly in position to be the one who finds missing schoolboy,Luke Ellis. He is the archetypal King ‘everyman’, joining the ranks of Bill Hodges, David Drayton, Ben Mears and more.

His moral compass swings to true north, and when he finds the mutilated, terrified boy, he instinctively goes in to bat for a child who is currently on the missing list as being the suspect in the deaths of his parents.

What Luke has gone through is unimaginable, the middle third of the book, after establishign Tim as the structural heart of the novel, places Luke as the brian, the intellect and the power behind Tim’s Samson-esque figure who goes up against a very shadowy, potential government body. Or, at least, it is one with tacit government approval, though you get the feeling that they would deny all knowledge of it if confronted…

Starting with the astonishingly horrific figure of missing children who are reported annually in the US (No exaggeration, it made my heart stop and check whether this was real. The sad fact is that of those children ‘reported’ missing, there a great many more undocumented and, since the book was published, that figure has risen.)

Luke has come onto the radar of The Institute, and as his lovely home life and future plans to be starting university at a frankly ludicrous age are laid out for the reader, the rug is swiftly pulled away. He wakes up in a facsimile of his bedroom, meets other children who warn him that the number of inmates goes rapidly down, as they are moved to the mysterious ‘Back Half’.

He endures a horrifying number of tests, all designed to provoke a latent talent that the powes that be believe is within him, and, as one by one, his friends are moved to the Back Half, and new ones take their place, Luke quickly realises that they have a race against time to use their powers to escape and raise the alarm. For what happens in the Back Half is far, far worse than anyone could guess…

King does what he does best when he writes about children, the end of innocence, the intractable nature of growing up being forced upon them and the exploitation of what should be a natural power in the ‘best interests’ of a society which wishes to manipulate them.

The shadows of Jonny Smith, Carrie White and Charlie McGee lurk in the background of the novel, and, whilst there are oblique and direct references to other King novels, it does not seem too far a stretch to link The Institute to the infamous Shop, or, the over arching Dark Tower series which reaches its tendrils into many other works.

And in Mrs Sigsby, King has created a villain which is easily the equal of any he has in the past, terrorised us with. Her blinkered vision of betraying these children for a ‘greater god’ and a future which may never exist, is a truly horrifying rationale to treat them as she does.

My mission is to try and read the more modern King’s, the ones I have started and never finished, or not started at all, for some weird reason, maybe it is a familiarity with his older stories that keeps leading me back there again and again? It’s a shame as the newer stories have a lot to offer, ‘‘The Outsider’ was terrific and scary as hell in this reader’s opinion.

Have you read it?

Drop me a line and let me know what you think!

Links to other King works

Page 145–‘They reminded Luke of twins in some old horror movie’ (‘The Shining’)

Page 311–‘George Allman’s show is called ‘The Outsiders’. People call in but it’s mostly just him talking.He doesn’t say it’s aliens or the government,or the government working with aliens,he’s careful because he doesn’t want to disappear like Jack and Bobby,but he talks about the black cars all the time. Things that would turn your hair white.Did you know that Son Of Sam was a walk-in?’ (‘The Outsider‘ ‘The Bill Hodges Trilogy’)

Page 315–‘There’s a town in Maine, Jersualem’s Lot, and if you could ask the people who lived there about the men in the black cars.If you can find any people at all that is. They all disappeared forty or more years ago.’ (‘Salem’s Lot’ ‘Night Shift’)

About the author…

Stephen King is the author of more than fifty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers. His first crime thriller featuring Bill Hodges, ‘Mr Mercedes’, won the Edgar Award for best novel and was shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger Award. Both ‘Mr Mercedes’ and ‘End Of Watch’ received the Goodreads Choice Award for the Best Mystery and Thriller of 2014 and 2016 respectively.

King co-wrote the bestselling novel ‘Sleeping Beauties‘ with his son Owen King, and many of King’s books have been turned into celebrated films and television series including ‘The Shawshank Redemption‘, ‘Gerald’s Game’ and ‘It‘.

King was the recipient of America’s prestigious 2014 National Medal of Arts and the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for distinguished contribution to American Letters. In 2007 he also won the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America. He lives with his wife Tabitha King in Maine

Links-https://www.stephenking.com/

Twitter @StephenKing

@HodderBooks