Perhaps the most compelling axiom of The Institute comes just a few pages into the story, when King’s narrator remarks that “reat events turn on small hinges.” This comment initially refers to the actions of the first character to whom we are introduced, Tim Jamieson, whose simple, spur-of-the-moment decision to give up his seat on a flight to New York might eventually (we suspect) lead to some sort of critically important plot element not wholly revealed until later in the story. While I admit that King recycles certain tropes and scenarios in his latest work, the results are nevertheless new and vibrant.

As advertised, The Institute is a tale delineating a troubling separation between children and the adult world, one that evokes images of Carrie White ( Carrie), Danny Torrance ( The Shining), Jack Sawyer ( The Talisman), and Tyler Marshall ( Black House).

To put it bluntly, first impressions are cheap. The pages almost turn themselves, the descriptions facilitate rather than dominate the imagination, and King even elicits tears as we follow new characters - Tim Jamieson, a retired police officer, and Luke Ellis, a child genius - from far corners of the United States to their eventual meeting in a small South Carolina town. Again, the dustjacket failed to convince me otherwise, and, yes, while King does selectively borrow from much of his previous writing, The Institute ultimately holds up well as an original and enjoyable text. My initial impression was that King had decided to merely revisit a key idea from his Dark Tower series - that children with special “talents” would be exploited in order to facilitate the end of the world. Indeed, the book’s front flap suggests that The Institute is another link in the growing chain of King’s literary universe: “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.”Īggressive foreshadowing aside (particularly as King begins with an epigraph from Judges in which a “good guy,” Samson, kills himself for a purportedly greater purpose), I will admit that when I first read the synopsis of this story, I was concerned. “YOU’VE BEEN HERE before.” Stephen King writes these four simple words at the beginning of Needful Things, the “last” Castle Rock story in King’s ever-expanding body of work, and, at first glance, these same words could just have easily been imprinted on the first page of his newest novel, The Institute.

Review the institute by stephen king