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.
Summary
The Institute is the second audiobook I’ve listened to this year. I listened to the German translation of the novel by Bernhard Kleinschmidt, narrated by David Nathan. The Institute is a Stephen King novel - the first Stephen King novel I’ve ever read. I didn’t place high expectations or really any expectations on it, though. In fact, The Institute was just a novel I probably bought with a free Audible credit years ago and just had lying around in my library, so I figured it’d be as good a book as any to listen to while I do chores and go on runs. As with my previous review, while I won’t outright spoil any plot points, I highly recommend you first read the book (or steel your resolve not to read it until you forget what I’ve said) before reading the rest of this review, as some points I make may still come off as spoiler-y to the keen reader.
The story mainly follows Luke Ellis, a twelve-year-old kid gifted with an extremely high IQ and miniscule supernatural abilities, and the secondary main character, Tim Jamieson, a former policeman turned patrolman in the small town of DuPray. The first chapter of the book describes Tim’s journey to becoming a patrolman in great detail - I daresay maybe too great. This initial, very slow introduction was a little bit of a turn-off, especially coming out of a gripping story like Blood Over Bright Haven. However, when we shift focus to Luke, the story picks up the pace dramatically, and we are soon introduced to a host of new side characters, mostly kids between the ages of ten and fourteen, as well as various staff of The Institute. Over the course of the book, we learn more about Luke’s exceptional gifts, both natural and supernatural, and follow him as he plots his escape from The Institute and deals with the resulting fallout.
Review
Despite mainly following one character, I greatly enjoyed that the novel was told from several perspectives. Not only Luke’s and Tim’s, but also various friends’ and adversaries’ from The Institute. It highlights the discrepancy between the rumours passed around by the kids and the reality of the situation as lived by the staff, and slightly humanises the antagonists, who would otherwise be rather one-dimensional villains if only portrayed from the kids’ perspectives. I also liked that The Institute was not portrayed as an impenetrable all-knowing shadow organisation, but rather as a victim of bureaucratic processes that caused wear and tear over time, leading to complacency and flaws in its surveillance and security systems, as well as characters pursuing different clashing agendas.
On top of that, when the story is told from the perspective of The Institute, King doesn’t shy away from having staff converse naturally, without premature exposition, which preserves some of the story’s mystery. For example, characters will use initialisms or nicknames that a reader isn’t supposed to understand until much later. This probably works better when going into the book completely blind, as I did. If you’re currently reading this post before having read the book - oops…
Stephen King knows how to induce a certain type of suspense in tense moments - even when I already knew what the likely outcome of an action or a scene would be, several moments in the book were presented in a way that genuinely had me questioning my judgment. I assume that writing scenes in such a way without dragging them out unnaturally is extremely difficult, so it definitely left an impression on me.
On the other hand, Stephen King absolutely does not know how to write children. And the way the characters are written, it feels more like a teenage novel at times - like it was written for children to root for their peers, rather than for adults to empathise with them. This is a problem with Luke, especially, who is a little bit of a Mary Sue, but the conversational mismatch exists in nearly all the child characters. This is not a huge deal, but I never really imagined the characters as pre-teens consciously while listening to the book. In my mind, they were always around the age of 17, possibly with the exception of Avery, who displays genuine childlike behaviour early on, but gradually shifts into the same vague blob of “not quite adult-like but almost” behaviour demonstrated by most of the child cast. I’d love to attribute this purely to character growth, but that didn’t feel quite like it was the case.
Final Review
The Institute was an enjoyable novel, and I didn’t really feel like I was wasting my time with it. The beginning was somewhat slow and left me wondering if the book was really worth my time, but once it picks up steam, it’s a comfortable read. Not quite as gripping as Blood Over Bright Haven, but not dry either. The worst I can say about the pacing is that sometimes the book lingers on irrelevant side stories for longer than necessary. In some cases, this is useful for the world- or character building, but there are also some instances where it adds nothing at all, and I retroactively wonder why certain passages were included in the book to begin with.
After Luke is introduced, the story progresses nicely and climaxes around the time when the two main characters meet. Much of the aftermath of the resulting climax feels like tying up loose ends, despite a major payoff scene still yet to come. But this scene, to me, falls a little flatter than the author may have intended. The true epilogue is okay, but nothing crazy. Somehow, both the perspectives of Luke and his adversaries ring a little hollow in the end. Of course, the book tries to present some case for why The Institute wasn’t actually all that bad - after all, who really writes one-dimensional antagonists in 2019? But I neither fully bought into the perspective presented for The Institute at the end, nor into Luke’s. The resulting showdown is divisive, but not in a way where both sides make a good case for themselves. More so, both sides pose an equally bad argument, so it’s hard to really pick a side.
The book describes itself as scary and horror. I think thriller is a better descriptor. There are definitely scary or uncomfortable scenes in this book, but it’s not really the main emotion I would connect with it. I think suspenseful is a better word for it, and “thriller” more closely resembles that emotion.
I don’t regret reading this book, but it definitely wouldn’t be as high up on my recommendation list as, say, Blood Over Bright Haven. If the premise of a shadow institute experimenting on gifted kids in pursuit of a perceived “greater good” interests you, the novel probably won’t disappoint. But I’ll quote an opinion I’ve seen online about it, which is that it kinda feels like this book was just banged out on a somewhat interesting story premise, without much focus on the details. It’s not groundbreaking, but not terrible either - maybe a bit of a summer vacation read. I’m rating it 3.5 out of 5 stars.