In The Institute Stephen King channels The Darkest Minds and The X-Files and if you think that’s me complaining, you are very wrong.
I’ve loved Stephen King books since I was a little girl, and have the crazy crammed book shelves to prove it. Of course, in the hierarchy of my love not all Stephen King books rank the same. Some I love because of the characters in particular. Some I love because of the plot, or the twisted ending. Some I love because of how messed up they are. And some I love for multiple reasons. While I wouldn’t rank The Institute in my top tier of Stephen King books, which I reserve for the lofty heights of The Eyes of the Dragon and a few others, It’s definitely a great read that I adored.
This review will contain mild but not large spoilers.
I’m a huge sucker for teenagers with weird powers and once I realized this book was about the government doing nefarious things with telekinetic and telepathic teenagers I was hooked to the point where I marathoned this book in two days and gave myself a backache due to my lack of motion.
We start off our story with Tim, a forty-two year old man who’s making odd choices for reasons unknown (hitchhiking, taking a poorly paid job that he’s way overqualified for in an awful sounding town) to him. It seems clear Tim is being driven by some sort of other power swaying him into making strange life decisions which instantly intrigued me. However, right when I’m super invested in Tim, the story makes a heel turn into the story of Luke, a twelve-year old child genius and his attempts to get into college.
One of my few complaints on this book is how abrupt this shift is. Stephen King often changes perspectives while keeping me invested in his characters, two qualities I adore in his writing, but this POV change seemed far more tonally jarring then his usual style. I had to forcefully make myself care about Luke’s story, trusting in King’s writing abilities to keep my interest. The irony being that after I got invested in Luke and his life, I cared about a hundred times more about him and his story then Tim, so it paid off in the end.
You see, Luke’s not only a genius, he’s a kind with mild telekinetic abilities that some shady government organization covets. He gets kidnapped and put into The Institute with other special kids and it’s there our story rockets off into brilliance.
As always with King, I couldn’t put the story down and I got invested in the smallest of characters within sentences of their introduction. He (along with Michael Grant) is sublime at breaking your heart over a character we barely know. People always talk about King’s ability to frighten, his creativity, his proficiency in content creation, but I feel more due should be given to the fact that he’s an absolute master at bonding you to his characters and then snatching them away.
He’s been criticized for his endings being lackluster, a point that occasionally has merit but which I think is overblown. Sure, sometimes the endings are odd *coughITcough* or unpopular (I still maintain The Dark Tower’s ending is f’ing brilliant) but some are completely fitting, like The Long Walk, and others are a perfect twisted mindfuck, like Revival. I definitely found the ending to this book satisfying, and even better, raising some very intriguing moral questions that I won’t get into for spoiler-y reasons.
I did have some minor quibbles alongside the tonal shift, one being that King’s teenaged character dialogue is often
and that Wendy falls into the trap of being a female character that’s kind of useless and expendable (and not what feels like in a deliberate way) but overall I highly recommend The Institute as a thought provoking and engaging story about a precocious young boy and the terrible choices he must make.
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