 Stephen King’s latest ‘The Institute’ disappoints this Constant Reader  Stephen King returns to the areas of telekinesis, telepathy and other psychic abilities in his underwhelming new novel The Institute. This might have been fresh and edgy material in the era of Carrie, The Dead Zone, Firestarter but in 2019 it comes across as old hat, with a plot which is more at home in the YA world of Stranger Things than from the pen of the world’s leading horror novelist. It’s worth noting that the leading character of Stranger Things ‘Eleven’ escaped from a place similar to ‘The Institute’ where kids with psychic abilities are routinely experimented upon, a plot very similar to this which also features in the prequel Suspicious Minds. Right from the start the premise feels very familiar, King often revisits old themes so there is nothing wrong with that. There is a secret school/prison which kidnaps kids who have unique abilities, experiment upon them, and try to enhance/control them for their own ends. Who are ‘they’? Secret government agencies? The CIA? And before we know it the story heads straight into The X-Files territory, sadly there is no Mulder or Scully to save the thin plot which is stretched over 480-pages. There was not much more to it and lacked the depth of what we have come to expect from this author. Having read every Stephen King novel, with an exception of a few Dark Tower efforts, I would place this effort comfortably in the bottom fifth. King sleep-walks his way through this tale and although regular readers may well soak up its familiarity with some nostalgia, this Constant Reader has read so many startlingly good other dark fiction novels in 2019, this falls well short of all of them by some distance. The Institute opens by introducing former cop Tim Jamieson who is slowly heading to New York, possibly to work in security whilst he decides what to do with the next stage of his life. However, when he is passing through a small South Carolinian town he is hired as a ‘Night Knocker’ which is a bottom-of-the-rung policeman with no ability to arrest or carry a weapon but helps keep the peace on the streets. This small-town sequence was very entertaining and the sort of thing King does very well, however, after page forty Jamieson disappears from the novel until quite near the end. This was a shame as he was an outstanding character who deserved more page time and was better company than most of the residents of The Institute which we shortly meet. When Tim eventually did return it was in a support role and I did not feel his reappearance gelled with the opening chapter. Much of the story is seen, in the third person, from the point of view of Luke Ellis who attends a school for gifted children. This twelve-year-old is so bright he can digest and understand a semester’s worth of post graduate world history and politics in a couple of weeks. He also has psychic abilities which his parents choose to ignore, which manifest particularly when he is stressed. Before long he is snatched and wakes up in a replica of his own bedroom, realising he is no longer at home, is introduced to a group of other kids who live there. They all have different abilities, including those who can read minds and move stuff. They have certain freedoms, but in reality they are there to be experimented upon and are no more than rats in a cage and much of the book is about the plight they face. I failed to find the teenagers particularly engaging who came across as rather cold or dull. For the most part the story was set exclusively in the institute/prison which became repetitive fairly quickly. The children are experimented upon and I found these sequences uninspiring and they’re punished for not following instructions exactly, but soon band together. Sadly, the villains in the story are pail imitations of others which have graced the pages of King novels, some of which are little more than bureaucrats, which was part of the political message the novel is pushing. A recently reviewed The Forgotten Girl by Rio Youers on Ginger Nuts of Horror, a novel which had many similarities to The Institute, but the Youers had a terrific villain in Dominic ‘The Spider’ Lang, which this book seriously lacked. The big boss of the Institute dishes out a few slaps, otherwise adds nothing to the non-existent fear factor and otherwise comes across like a stern Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and administers the occasional anal probe. King recently snarked a Twitter response to The Telegraph reviewer Jake Kerridge who commented upon the low quality of his endings; he should not have bothered as this particular effort was telegraphed from ten miles away and strayed into action novel territory and for the most part seemed to forget the horror element. As the rag-tag bunch launched their unlikely assault on The Institute I half expected the cast of Stranger Things to throw themselves into the mix. If you are a Stephen King fan who is happy to read anything the author puts out you may well find this non-threatening effort perfectly serviceable, but if you follow horror closely (and don’t just read the big boys) this novel falls well short of the best of 2019 which it should be judged against. If you want to be terrified take a pop on something else brand new: try Andrew Cull’s terrifying debut Remains or Cody Luff’s dystopian nightmare Ration. If you fancy hang around until Halloween Adam Nevill’s truly monstrous The Reddening hits the shelves around then; now there is a horror master writing at the peak of his powers. Finally, if you fancy a genre-bending mind-twister which will have you scratching your head or scouring the internet for answers then seek out Iain Reid’s Foe. If King is going to continue to release work as mediocre as this then his huge readership may well lose patience and start looking elsewhere. Tony Jones    Comments are closed.
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