What a year this is for Stephen King fans. We’ve already been treated to film adaptations of It and Pet Sematary, with Doctor Sleep, the sequel to The Shining, still to come, on Halloween no less. And one cannot ignore the popularity of Netflix’s Stranger Things, a Frankenstein’s monster of King tropes.
But while 2019 might be a good year for King on screen, his latest novel, The Institute, disappoints.
Our hero is Luke, a 12-year-old genius who can master just about anything he puts his mind to, from chess strategy to advanced maths. He also, as it happens, possesses a minor telekinetic ability, though this doesn’t amount to much more than rattling a plate or two.
At night he is drugged, abducted and taken to a secret facility in the woods in Maine where children who show signs of telekinesis or telepathy are imprisoned and subjected to horrible experiments.
Many of the staff are creepily chirpy (“Seeya later, alligator”) and punish dissent with, at first, an open-handed slap. Electric shocks and waterboarding come later. Luke plans his escape then leads a psychic kid revolution against the Institute’s boss, Mrs Sigby, a sour, evil headmistress-type cut from the same cloth as Harry Potter’s Professor Umbridge or Miss Slighcarp in Joan Aiken’s The Wolves of Willoughby Chase.
But despite a few good moments of peril and thrills, The Institute feels oddly tame, lacking the psychological credibility of King’s best work that makes the horror hit home and sells you on the trippier stuff. It could well translate to a good TV series, though. Indeed, one is already in the works.
The Institute by Stephen King (Hodder, £20), buy it here.
