BOOK 216: THE INSTITUTE: STEPHEN KING

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. The operation takes less than two minutes. Luke will wake up at The Institute, in a room that looks just like his own, except there’s no window. 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. They are all in Front Half. Others, Luke learns, graduated to Back Half, “like the roach motel,” Kalisha says. “You check in, but you don’t check out.”

In this most sinister of institutions, the director, Mrs. Sigsby, and her staff are ruthlessly dedicated to extracting from these children the force of their extranormal gifts. There are no scruples here. If you go along, you get tokens for the vending machines. If you don’t, punishment is brutal. As each new victim disappears to Back Half, Luke becomes more and more desperate to get out and get help. But no one has ever escaped from the Institute.

(Information found here… )

MY VERDICT: This is the first Stephen King book I’ve ever read, I know, crazy right? I read a couple of short stories from the Bachman books years and years ago, but didn’t like the way that Stephen King wrote. I liked his stories but just figured I’d wait until the films came out. I enjoyed the story of this one, but I did feel that it wasn’t that well written. It’s meant to be told from the point of view of a child so that might be why it was written, for lack of a better term, childishly. I haven’t got any other King books to reference it against so I’m not sure. It was a page turner none the less, but not very believable or plausible, I like my fantasy that way, but I’ll be honest it’s not the kind of thing I normally read. If you like this kind of thing I would definitely recommend.

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