The Institute starts off slowly…King introduces Tim Jamieson, a former Florida cop looking to start a new life in a small South Carolina town.

evil in a world where the good guys don’t always win. But no one has ever escaped from the Institute.Īs psychically terrifying as Firestarter, and with the spectacular kid power of It, The Institute is Stephen King’s gut-wrenchingly dramatic story of good vs. As each new victim disappears to Back Half, Luke becomes more and more desperate to get out and get help. If you go along, you get tokens for the vending machines. Sigsby, and her staff are ruthlessly dedicated to extracting from these children the force of their extranormal gifts. In this most sinister of institutions, the director, Mrs. Others, Luke learns, graduated to Back Half, “like the roach motel,” Kalisha says. 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.

Luke will wake up at The Institute, in a room that looks just like his own, except there’s no window. The operation takes less than two minutes. 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. This story brought me back to being a kid again. I can remember staying up all night long to read it, and how the ending GUTTED me), mostly worrying about the kids in the story, and if they would survive whatever hell had come down upon them.

Its been MANY years since those first late-night readings of The Shining and Thinner (not his greatest work, but no book EVER has made more of a lasting impression on me than Thinner. This book brought me back to the feelings I had when I first discovered Stephen King, back in Junior High, staying up late at night, scared to death about what might happen to my favorite characters. But I can’t think of a reading experience that I enjoyed more than this. Was it the best book of 2019? Probably not. Welcome to The Institute, my favorite book of 2019.

The institute stephen king book