The Institute

by Stephen King

'It does everything you'd expect of a masterpiece - and it is one' Sunday Express
'Hums and crackles with delicious unease' Independent
'A captivating, hybrid novel that shape-shifts through several genres' The Sunday Times

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 sheriff. 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.

• ISBN10: 1529355397
• ISBN13: 9781529355390
• Publish Date: 10 September 2019
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 5 March 2021
• Publish Country: GB
• Imprint: Hodder & Stoughton
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 496
• Language: English

Reviews

Maybe I am being a bit too harsh... but I just didn't like this book. It had a very strong beginning, and after 100 pages, I started to get bored with it. It could have easily been half of the pages and the story would have been the exact same. I didn't care about the characters because I felt no connection to them. They stayed pretty one dimensional. Also, it was really predictable... I was waiting for a plot twist at the end, but it never came.
I love the cover and the first 100 pages. The characters were interesting, but not developed enough for me to care about them.

Also, at the end of the book, we switched perspectives almost every page and it was just a bit too much. There were also a lot of unnecessary references to politics, tv shows, and other wars in the world, that make this book have an expiration date and made it seem more desperate to entertain the audience.

[clq]

There is something about reading the first few chapters of a Stephen King book that invokes a feeling of "Aaaand, we're back." The Institute is no exception.

In this one we meet Tim, a policeman with a history who decides to take a bit of a detour, and Luke, a boy with unnatural intelligence, and supernatural abilities. And, to keep this review spoiler-free, that's about as much as I want to say about the plot.

I really liked this book, but other than the sentence "it was great", which by itself doesn't make for that much of a book-review, it's a little hard to put my finger on exactly why. It could be that this book, despite being relatively short, manages to be a lot of things at the same time - all of which I found to be interesting and well done. At the centre of the story there are children interacting with each other under very unnatural circumstances, the conceit for which is a conspiracy-story, which then starts interacting with a Grisham-like small-town sheriff/community situation that we're introduced to in the start of the book. All wrapped into a story about supernatural abilities. The combination of all these elements works very well, the tone is just what it needs to be at any given time, and it all feels completely effortless.

It's not a perfect book though. Supernaturality aside, there are some places where I had to suspend my disbelief a little more than I'd have liked to, and, a little unusually for Stephen King, some places where my annoyance at the characters not doing what seemed like the obvious thing distracted me from the story. Though, in the end it didn't really matter much. The Institute is still a very solid, enjoyable read, and contributes to just lowering my jaw at the overall authorship of Stephen King.

Even without taking the sheer volume of books he writes into account, I do find Stephen King's writing to be remarkable, and when I consider the rate at which he keeps churning out books, it becomes incredible. What gets me the most is that I'd never really thought of myself as a fan of the "real world with a touch of the supernatural" genre, yet here we are. Time and again Stephen King manages to make a book thrilling in a "this could actually happen"-way, while somehow managing not to spoil my enjoyment of what feels real by including supernatural events. Or, as he puts it in the Author's Note at the end of the book, he's "making the impossible plausible." This point holds for several of his books, but all the more for this one, as the plot revolves around the existence of the supernatural. With The Institute it just works for me.

Fortunately I have many more King books to read, and probably many more that have yet to be released. The Institute isn't a book that I'll go around thinking about for a long time. It's not a book that challenged me or made me think about things in a different light. It's not a book that informed me, or that had much of a message to convey. It is, however, a really entertaining piece of fiction, and a joy to read. It's what I expect from Stephen King, and it is what he keeps giving me. And I will keep wanting to receive it.

[kimbacaffeinate]

As is typical of King he takes his time setting up the world, fleshing out his characters and giving us a sense of things before plunging us into the twisted darkness that awaits us there. He makes you think as he unravels a tale that seems both horrific and yet strangely plausible. For me, this felt like old school King and I slipped in letting the outside world float away.

Like most of King’s books I went into this story completely blind with nothing more than the cover to guide me. We meet and travel with, Tim Jamieson, a former police officer with several commendations. He is traveling to New York to begin a new career and through a series of events ends up in Dupray, South Carolina.

We then meet young Luke Ellis, a twelve-year-old genius living in the suburbs of Minneapolis. Aside from Luke’s intelligence he appears to move things unintentionally when he is excited or stressed. In the middle of the night an SUV enters his quiet neighborhood and three strangers dressed in black quietly invade his home. He awakens to a noise to see a strange woman in his room then everything goes dark. When he awakens, he is is in his room… only it’s not his room. He is thousands of miles away in rural Maine at a place known as the Institute. And so it begins.

Holy Mindbenders. Secret government compounds, experiments, creepy doctors, front rooms, back rooms, tests, changes and more await you. I will not say more. I don’t think this was scary horror, but it did cause the hair on the back of my neck to stand on end a few times particularly in the back half. We meet a group of kids varying in age from ten to I think sixteen and what they are put through is horrifying.

*whispers* Fans of Stranger Things..think Eleven.

The two threads merge and it’s one heck of a ride. The audio is nineteen hours long and I finished in two days. It left me bleary eyed with a book hangover. All I am saying is this… It was worth it!

Santino Fontana delivered with the narration giving voice to a wide range of characters and age groups. All of them felt authentic and his female voices were spot on. I think he enhanced the villians and strengthened Lucas’s journey. This review was originally posted at Caffeinated Reviewer