"In the middle of the night, in a house on a quiet street
in suburban Minneapolis, intruders silently murder Luke Ellis’s parents and
load him into a black SUV. The operation takes less than two minutes. Luke will
wake up at The Institute, in a room that looks just like his own, except
there’s no window. And outside his door are other doors, behind which are other
kids with special talents—telekinesis and telepathy—who got to this place the
same way Luke did: Kalisha, Nick, George, Iris, and ten-year-old Avery Dixon.
They are all in Front Half. Others, Luke learns, graduated to Back Half, “like
the roach motel,” Kalisha says. “You check in, but you don’t check out.”
In this most sinister of institutions, the director, Mrs. Sigsby, and her staff
are ruthlessly dedicated to extracting from these children the force of their extra
normal gifts. There are no scruples here. If you go along, you get tokens for
the vending machines. If you don’t, punishment is brutal. As each new victim
disappears to Back Half, Luke becomes more and more desperate to get out and
get help. But no one has ever escaped from the Institute"
Like all King’s books, The Institute is a battle between
good and evil. But while the book owes a lot to King’s past works –Firestarter
and Carrie comes to mind, but a few others as well - and the huge success of
Stranger Things, he does give us a novel that is still unexpectedly different,
if only because it starts off one way and then goes another way. We start with a
troubled ex-cop from Sarasota, who’s on his way north and whose stopover in a
small backwater town becomes more permanent. And in typical King fashion, while
the town of DuPray does not exist in a vacuum (it’s modern and even has a black
sheriff), it still carries the DNA of other small towns King has introduced to
us Constant Reader –a place where everyone knows everyone’s business. Then it
shifts to a story about Luke and events of The Institutes. It’s here where the
bulk of the book takes place. As I read, I was curious how Tim Jamieson and
Luke will intersect.
As usual, just as well, we get character development –something
King has always excelled in. We get a lot of backstory most the characters,
including the bad folks as well (who are not evil –though they are- but more
people who do bad things in pursuant of a goal). We’ve also seen King use the
special child trope before (see above) and Luke is no Danny Torrance or Carrie
White, because his “powers” seem more about his ability to puzzle out problems
than read people’s minds or move objects (though he can do that, but he needs
the abilities of the other kids to enhance that). So Luke is written as a
12-year-old genius and seems more adult than the adults, but he still has believable,
well written pre-teenager who has a lot issues. The fact that he can still function,
still plan, is still more a plot device, but King works in magic here.
It’s a big book, dark with ideas, more science fiction
(or magical realism) than horror, but still a well paced tale.
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