1st Scribner hardcover edition (US/CAN), 561 pages
English language
Published Sept. 1, 2019 by Scribner.
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 …
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 versus evil in a world where the good guys don't always win.
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.
Unoriginal and predictable, but a page-turner nevertheless!
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.
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.
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…
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
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.
