That light comes in the form of a cleaning lady named, Maureen, who befriends Luke. German cover variant for King’s The Institute.Īs in many of King’s books, there is a light at the end of the tunnel in The Institute. Word spreads like wildfire among the children in the Front Half that graduation is to be avoided at all costs and they all work together to try to resist the experiments as desperately as possible. The truth is, it is even worse than never being heard from again-these children become captive in their own bodies, trapped inside their minds in some type of wasteland left behind by these invasive experiments. Once the experiments have been deemed successful (or sometimes found to be fruitless), the children “graduate” into the Back Half of The Institute and are never seen or heard from again. In order to maximize their abilities, the children are put through a series of unpleasant experiments that sometimes have disastrous and intensely painful effects. We soon find out that there are many more children like Luke in The Institute, and they are all there because of their special talents-telekinesis (known as TKs in The Institute) and telepathy (known as TPs). He later wakes up in The Institute, a facility located in the deep woods of Maine (you knew we were going to get to Maine somehow or it wouldn’t be a Stephen King novel), in a room that is an exact replica of his own back in Minnesota. By chance, he gives up his seat on a plane bound for New York City and ends up in a small South Carolina town where a series of events leads him to accept a job working for the local sheriff.Īround the same time in Minneapolis, Minnesota, intruders break into 12-year-old Luke Ellis’s home, kill his parents, and kidnap him. The beginning follows would-be drifter, Tim Jamieson, who leaves his unfulfilling job and takes to the road in search of something new. Like many of King’s works, there are really two parts to this book that end up converging in a powerful and explosive way.

First edition United States cover art.Ģ019’s The Institute is billed as a science fiction/horror novel. So, when I learned that King had released a novel that was a bit more like these titles, I was intrigued.

I especially love his classic novels, such as Carrie and Misery, and novellas like The Body, the short which spawned the heart-wrenching movie, Stand by Me.

The institute book stephen king