The Institute

A Novel

by Stephen King

B format paperback, 485 pages

English language

Published Aug. 7, 2020 by Hodder.

ISBN:: 978-1-5293-5541-3
OCLC Number:: 1236451814

(78 reviews)

Luke Ellis, a super-smart twelve-year-old with an exceptional gift, is the latest in a long line of kids abducted and taken to a secret government facility, hidden deep in the forest in Maine.

Here, kids with special talents - telekinesis and telepathy - like Luke's new friends Kalisha, Nick and Iris, are subjected to a series of experiments.

There seems to be no hope of escape. Until Luke teams up with an even younger boy whose powers of telepathy are off the scale.

Meanwhile, far away in a small town in South Carolina, former cop Tim Jamieson, looking for the quiet life, has taken a job working for the local sheriff. He doesn't know he's about to take on the biggest case of his career... --back cover

18 editions

Jakers reviewed The Institute by Stephen King

This was fun!

4 stars

Content warning Spoiling themes about the book, but not the actual plot.

I think my thoughts about this book were best expressed in a text I sent to a friend: this is like Stephen King wrote a Dean Koontz novel.

It's definitely more sci-fi than horror, which is my favorite subgenre of King stories, and there's a political/anti-war theme that runs through the book that was written pretty well: King thinks drone strikes suck (and he's right) and isn't a fan of youth being stolen by the military for endless wars. The justification for those "drone strikes" (which becomes a play on words later in the book) is shakey and based on questionable intelligence. The people who run The Institute are mostly veterans and former law enforcement, and they engage in barbaric tactics both "on the battlefield" (aka inside a child Gitmo) and when recruiting new soldiers. Those child soldiers are lied to, emptied out, and discarded once they aren't useful anymore.

Very cool job weaving all that in with the narrative, interesting wordplay, and a fun thriller story. The only place it lacks, honestly, is with the mostly typical King ending. The last few chapters were a bit info-dumpy and clearly there to answer the unanswered question of "why", but the ride there was fun and kept me into it.

The series will be interesting to watch, just because I wonder how many of the showrunners really picked up on the underlying themes of the book.

Tl;Dr: it's "Scanners" but as an allegory for the military industrial complex and the war on terror.

David Scott Moyer reviewed The Institute by Stephen King

One of his best

5 stars

Drawing on our deepest fears of government overreach and science gone wrong, King masterfully weaves an edge of your seat story. Largely devoid of King's signature over the top vulgarity and gore, this story nonetheless terrifies.

hwebb reviewed The Institute by Stephen King

Review of 'The Institute' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

Unoriginal and predictable, but a page-turner nevertheless!

decadent_and_depraved reviewed The Institute by Stephen King

Review of 'Institute' on 'Goodreads'

1 star

I guarantee you this: If this stream of badly written diarrhea had anybody else's name on the cover, this book would be one of those works everybody brings up to bond over how much of a shitfest it is. Rightfully so. The plot is entirely predictable. The characters are laughably cartoonish. I wish it was a sort of fun cartoonish that you find in bizarro fiction, but sadly, it is that sort of cartoonish one can only laugh at in hopes of forgetting one painful fact: This book was written by King. All this is bad enough, but for fucking love of everything holy and unholy, why, oh why, is this book so fucking long.

pithypants reviewed The Institute by Stephen King

Review of 'The Institute' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

Say what you will about him, but Stephen King is a machine. He consistently delivers good, suspenseful stories that are equal parts plot and character. This was just the right level of dark for me.

drizzy reviewed The Institute by Stephen King

Review of 'The Institute' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

In the dark all the shadows disappear

Another great Stephen King read. It made me laugh, it made me angry, it made me confused. But above all - it made me enjoy reading again.Stephen King can make improbable seem possible. The mixture of real work and fantastical is blended with great care, creating sort of “uncanny valley” feeling of “Maybe. Just maaaybe. It could happen?”.Kids getting abducted and carried away into an Institute to use their abilities for “good of the world”. And among them one with just a bit extra brains which might help him free all his new friends. If only he can get some help…

DigitalAnachronist reviewed The Institute by Stephen King

Review of 'The Institute' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

It felt derivative of the author's previous work Firestarter and Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game. However it did that thing that Mr. King's novels always do; when the story ended, I felt lost without the characters I had befriended through the reading. Not Stephen King's best work, but hardly a disappointment.

Coalford reviewed The Institute by Stephen King

Review of 'The Institute' on 'Goodreads'

2 stars

While looking up what a night knocker was to understand the first couple chapters, I found a comment that said this was an older story set in the 70s or 80s with random parts that felt copy pasted to make it fit into current day.

After reading, I don't have a doubt about that. There are a variety of weird disjointed bits that don't quite fit. I don't need to go into specifics. You'll know em when you read em.

And then there's the kids.

Stephen King is one of my favourite authors. But man... He cannot write children. He can't.

Although all of the young characters are likeable, they all speak like my mother wearing a sideways hat and an Adidas jumpsuit.

It's an okay book to pass the time, but won't be staying on my favorites shelf

unsquare reviewed The Institute by Stephen King

Review of 'The Institute' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

This was a solid adventure story that moved along at a brisk pace. I was expecting something a bit more horror-tinged when I started reading it, but instead this was mostly a fantasy about terrible things happening to telepathic and telekinetic kids. This was also the closest King has come to a young adult novel since maybe Eyes of the Dragon, although it was fairly profane, so maybe that would disqualify it in some circles. King sticks the landing here, and I enjoyed it a lot.