Chilling, Mind Blowing, and Captivating: Insight Into Stephen King's Latest Novel

On the first pages of Stephen King’s 2018 novel The Institute, he shares a chilling statistic: “According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, roughly 800,000 children are reported missing each year in the United States. Most are found. Thousands are not.”

Believe it or not, at 72 years old Stephen King is still writing and publishing epic science fiction novels that captivate the attention of readers of all ages. His newest book, published late 2019, The Institute explores a world in which children have been gifted with supernatural abilities such as telekinesis and telepathy.

At 557 pages, the novel is remarkably on the shorter side for a King epic, but reads quickly and is extremely hard to put down. The main plot of the story follows Luke Ellis, a 12-year-old boy with telekinetic abilities and an exceptional IQ level. When his parents are murdered and he wakes up in a room that looks just like his except with no windows, Luke discovers that he is at The Institute. After a couple days in the facility Luke realizes that the facility is used to perform tests on children that possess supernatural abilities, and eventually weaponize them to murder potential terrorists.

Stephen King has written many books in which children are the protagonists and they always end up having to fight some sort of evil, whether it be human or monster. For example, in the scary clown classic IT, a group of seven kids must fight a shapeshifting clown. The Institute is also centered around children, but that can be easily forgotten while reading because what they have endured in the facility has given them the maturity level of grown adults. In a way it is sad to see kids lose the part of themselves that makes them kids, but King imagines an interesting world in which children come together to break free from evil.

While the novel isn’t your typical horror story, it can be categorized as a thriller and it definitely has that “scare” factor. King dives into themes of psychological and physical abuse of children, homicide, and even world domination. Perhaps the scariest part is there are no monsters or creatures, and rather the “bad guys” are terrifyingly human. Readers are forced to stop and think about the current trajectory of the world we live in, and how easy it has become to justify horrific actions such as the inhumane treatment of children.

One of my favorite quotes appears as the novel comes to a close, a character named Tim Jamieson finds himself taking care of Luke after the traumatic events that occurred and thinks to himself that “sometimes a hug [is] telepathy.” This was a touching moment between two people who don’t always know how to share what they are feeling. King has a way with words, this can be seen throughout the novel as he often makes the reader stop and reflect and even makes references to other books and movies (sometimes even his own work).

This was my first Stephen King novel and I was pleasantly surprised! I read the book in about a week and was disappointed when it ended because I didn’t want to let go of Luke, Nicky, Kalisha, Avery and the other exceptional characters. A journalist from the Boston Globe summed up the novel perfectly when they said “The Institute is another winner: creepy and touching and horrifyingly believable, all at once.”