Eventually, kids who survive treatment in the Front Half are sent to the Back Half, where they are slowly but systematically shorn of the final vestiges of their humanity and reduced to a core of pure paranormal potential – the equivalent of stripping the insulation off of a live wire.
In time, though, he intuits that his treatment in what is known as the Institute’s Front Half is intended to develop and amplify his paranormal powers. The purpose of the Institute is not immediately apparent to Luke, owing to the unforthcoming staff of doctors and guards who subject him and his fellow inmates to inspections, medical tests, injections, and ritualized abuse so heartless (in one particularly hideous instance involving an immersion tank) that any faithful film adaptation of this novel will likely get slapped with an R-rating. There, Luke discovers that he’s been imprisoned with a clutch of kids approximately the same age as him, all of whom possess nascent powers of telekinesis and telepathy (abbreviated throughout as TK and TP) in varying degrees. Rather, it’s an example of how he finds new angles from which to present familiar ideas rich with possibilities.Īt its broadest, The Institute is the story of Luke Ellis, a 12-year-old prodigy living in Minneapolis whose academic achievements at a school for gifted children are so far off the charts that he’s contemplating dual enrollment at MIT and Emerson College – until one grim evening when a tactical squad of kidnappers invades his home, murders his parents, and abducts him to the titular top-secret Institute, located in the backwoods of rural Maine.
This is not a case of King retreading ground that he’s covered before. It wouldn’t be accurate to say that Stephen King’s new novel, The Institute, is a blueprint for his career as a novelist, but in it King reprises themes that he has explored regularly over the past 45 years, notably: children endowed with wild paranormal talents (think Carrie, The Shining, and even End of Watch, the third novel in his Bill Hodges crime trilogy) that unscrupulous adults attempt to exploit ( Firestarter, anyone?), and those children discovering, while on the run from pursuers ( Doctor Sleep? Check.) that they are a formidable force for saving themselves when they band together and pool their powers (surely you’ve read – or at least seen the movie adaptation of – It).
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