I’m a huge Stephen King nerd. I mean, I don’t have a map of his multiverse on my wall or anything, but I own hardback copies of most of his books, have read almost everything he’s ever published (still missing a bunch of very early short stories though), and have watched just about every King property that’s been produced for visual media. So, yeah, a nerd.
Mr. King has been very busy the last several years, which is awesome. He’s producing a ton of new material and there have been more adaptations in the last three or four years than all his previous career combined, I believe. Basically, I’m in hog heaven these days.
The Institute (2019)
Written by: Stephen King
Genre: Horror/Urban Fantasy
Pages: 576 (Hardcover)
Publisher: Scribner
The Premise:
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 extranormal 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.
As psychically terrifying as Firestarter, and with the spectacular kid power of It, The Institute is Stephen King’s gut-wrenchingly dramatic story of good vs. evil in a world where the good guys don’t always win.
There will be some spoilers in this review. They’re mainly general plot traits, rather than plot points. I have to mention them in order to talk about some of the larger messages and themes in the book.
Discussion: The stolen children at the Institute all have one thing in common: they’ve tested positive on a certain blood test administered to newborns. The Institute tracks these children as they grow and then snatch them once they hit about ten or twelve.
The Institute hits some of King’s common tropes: kids with mental powers, kids in trouble, a Big Bad that is a bureaucracy rather than a monster. Also, a number of King’s works over the last decade or so focus on people as monsters. Some earlier books have this focus, as well, like Misery. Even Carrie was more about human beings as the bad guys rather than the person with powers. The Institute follows this trend, where the people without powers are doing the really atrocious things, while those with powers are the victims. The children are kept in line with abuse, like being shocked with what is basically a cattle prod.
As always, King’s strengths in this book come in the form of characterization, particularly the kids. He’s always been excellent at portraying children — their fears, their motivations. “The Body” (Stand by Me), It, and Pet Sematary are good examples of this.
This strength is always mentioned, but I think where he really shines isn’t only in the characterizations, but in showing how relationships are forged. He seems to have an innate understanding about how people connect and bond, and those bonds are often at the hearts of his stories. In this book, he looks at how the relationships among these specific children form — from shared distress — but he also speaks to the way kids often form relationships in general: shows of power.
When a new, young boy is brought to the group, a bigger boy harasses him. Watching who stands up to the bully and who doesn’t is interesting, but more interesting is the relationships in the end — all of the children have become friends. This reflects how children bond with each other, mentioned above, and also in how human beings band together in the face of a common enemy.
The Institute looks at a number of societal issues that we’re facing today, particularly. Bullying, children being ripped from their families and held against their will, sacrificing the few for the many, and the politics of fear.
The book’s main character is 12-year-old Luke Ellis, an actual genius who has already been given early dual admittance to two prestigious universities. He is stolen by the Institute because of a latent, and mostly ineffectual, telekinetic gift. This leads to some interesting statements on people and society, and the modern propensity for throwing things away.
Luke is a great mind. An Einstein mind. A Hawking mind. But the Institute doesn’t care about that. They care about siphoning this tiny power from him for its own use, thereby wasting his greatest strength.
They are so embroiled in achieving their goals that they would empty out and toss aside the most brilliant person of his generation. It speaks to the inherent flaw of bureaucratic control — losing humanity. In that way, this story is very much about throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Most of the children kidnapped by the Institute would have gone on to lead normal lives, likely without any particular merit (aside from Luke). Their abilities may have made for fun party tricks until they lost them as adults, but otherwise, they’d have moved through the world just like the rest of us. But the Institute steals the children away to harness their short-lived powers in order to create changes on the world stage. It speaks to the problem of “sacrifice the few to protect the many,” as well as the willingness to do anything to achieve some feeling of safety. This is not the same as “a few sacrificing themselves to protect the many.” It is an issue of consent.
If this all seems familiar, it’s because it’s a common enough theme in several of King’s stories, from Carrie to Firestarter. Indeed, the similarities with Firestarter can’t be ignored. That main character is being pursued by the Shop — an organization not unlike the Institute — which is bent on using her gift to their own ends. The Shop makes an appearance in several other lesser-known stories as well, so it has a solid foundation in the King multiverse.
We don’t know whether the Institute is related to the Shop, but in previous works, the Shop has remained mysterious. We don’t ever learn what’s really going on inside that organization. We only have the barest of hints about what it does, who it involves, or its overall purpose.
By contrast, we learn almost all of those things about the Institute. We know what it’s doing with the children they abduct and why they’re doing it. It’s a plan which affects the entire world stage. It’s daunting in its magnitude. The only thing that is still shadowy is the question of who it involves. We learn who the local people are, yes. But there are others, higher up, whose identities are never revealed in this book. And this, of course, sets us up for future stories about these Big Bads. I wouldn’t be surprised if we hear about the Shop in a future Institute book, too.
In Conclusion: The brutality shown to the children by the Institute adults, both those in charge and those tasked to watch and administer to the kids, serves as a reminder that human beings can be deeply changed by power over fellow human beings. We see that in any number of instances, from Nazi concentration camps to the Stanford Prison Experiment to US military POW camps in the Middle East to immigrant detention centers here in the United States right now. King does an incredible, if horrifying, job of bringing that human flaw to vivid life on these pages.
The nurses and attendants in the Institute no longer see their charges as children. They are products. They are commodities. They are not human and so are not treated as human.
These instances of isolating current societal problems adds a level of terror to The Institute that goes beyond reading a scary story.
The most frightening tales are the ones that can be real — the ones about human monsters.
The ones that can be us.
I was a huge fan of Stephen King and true crime books when I was twelve (needless to say, I was not a popular child), but it seemed like he hit a serious slump in the nineties. I’ve gotten back into him since reading 11/22/63. I’m glad to a good review about The Institute, because it originally sounded too much like a rerun of Firestarter.