The Institute
by Stephen King
Scribner, an imprint of Simon and Schuster
(c) 2019
In the wordcloud that surrounds the career of Stephen Edwin King, one of the biggest has to be “supernatural.” Most of his works have at least some supernatural in them, and they tend to be both his most popular and most (in)famous: It, The Stand, Salem’s Lot; there’s about 50 of them.
King is a master of dread, of fear, of sudden hands clutching at the reader in the dark. And nothing inspires dread better than the occult; that which lies in the shadows, beyond human knowledge.
Because of that, people often overlook, or at least deprecate his other talents as a writer. He’s a master storyteller. His plots are complex, sinuous, but never confusing or contrived. There’s nobody better at building characters who are believable, very human, and even the monsters are sympatico, even likeable.
So it’s the novels that have a studied lack of vampires and devils and haunted towns in Maine that are often the ones that stand out the most in his vast library. Gerald’s Game, the Mister Mercedes series, and 11/22/63 are all examples of truly horrifying stories where the biggest monster is plain old human bloodymindedness, particularly the sorts that are either unintentional or fully rationalized and held aloft by Good Intentions.
With The Institute, King has done the unimaginable; he has upped his game. The evil, as deep as evil can be, is entirely human, and utterly self-justified by the conviction that it, and it alone, can save the world from utter destruction. The villains, the reader is absolutely certain, have real-life correlates in Homeland Security, Russia’s Federal Security Service, or ICE. Especially ICE. Unspeakables doing the unimaginable to the undeserving in the name of God and Country. In interviews this week, King avers that main plot of the book; innocent children incarcerated and abused in the name of public safety; was laid out before the horrific stories of America’s kiddie koncentration kamps made the news, and that he tries to keep politics out of his novels. That last bit, at least, is pure horseshit; King takes a few times to take hard shots at the well-deserving Trump. Well, nobody intelligent enough to read a King book is going to be a Trump supporter anyway.
The plot is this: a shadowy organization is kidnapping children, killing their families, and taking them to a mysterious compound deep in the woods of Maine known as “The Institute,” and doing things to them. The reader meets their point of view victim, 12 year old Luke Ellis, when he is kidnapped and taken to the compound. Luke is no ordinary kid: he took his SATs, scoring 1580, and two major universities are fighting over getting him as a showcase prodigy student. But that isn’t what attracted the attention of the Institute: a ‘routine’ blood test at birth revealed he had a high brain-derived neurotrophic factor; this made him a “pink,” a kid who had a predilection for either telekinesis or telepathy, or rarely, both. Luke has a nearly incidental psychokinetic ability; he can rattle dishes and move a pen about when upset. Nothing to write home about.
When the time came, the Institute viciously harvested him for their own high-intentioned ends. The Institute has absolutely no interest in Luke’s intelligence and aptitude; they care only about the treatments they use to augment his psychic abilities. And they know that by the time they’ve finished ‘augmenting’ him, he wouldn’t have much in the way of a mind remaining. Thus they underestimate him.
The most riveting part of the story is that of the children held captive in the Institute. It has elements of both Lord of the Flies and Thomas Disch’s Camp Concentration, but the writing is purest King. You not only care about these kids; you love them. That they are in thrall to well-meaning monsters who deliberately dehumanize their doomed charges adds to the horror in a way that no sewer-dwelling clown or malevolent Buick possibly could. You know these kids—perhaps you raised some of them. You know the monsters, too; they hide behind the copy machine and in the corner cubicle at work.
The result, with a thunderous ending, is arguably the best novel King has written. And given his portfolio, that’s saying a lot.
Days after the novel was released, it was announced that Spyglass Media Group have acquired television rights to the novel, and that David E. Kelley and Jack Bender will be producing the show. What makes this particularly intriguing is that they also produced “Mr. Mercedes” which I consider the finest television adaptation of any King work to date. It’s a breathtaking prospect.