gilda_elise

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.

As psychically terrifying as Firestarter, and with the spectacular kid power of It, The Institute is Stephen King’s gut-wrenchingly dramatic story of good vs. evil in a world where the good guys don’t always win.

At first I wondered who this “Tim” guy was, but I trust King and knew it would all tie together eventually, and, eventually, it did.

It did when Luke Ellis enters the story Kidnapped from his family home and taken to a place known as The Institute, he finds that he’s not the only kid there. King has always had a knack for writing children well. They act like kids. Not like the moronic kids we see on most tv programs, or, swinging the other way, like little adults. They act like kids the way I remember acting, which makes the story easy to read, no easy task considering the length. The story has plenty of suspense, as Luke and the other kids learn why they are there and what will become of them. They all have unique personalities that we come to lknow and ove as each meets their fate. Actually, I wouldn’t have minded a little addendum. I would love to know what happens to the survivors.

But let’s not forget Tim and the other people of his town who come in contact with Luke. They, too, are complex and fully drawn. Some are good, some not so good, but always engaging.

The film rights to the book have already been acquired, on the day the book was released! (big surprise.) I can hardly wait to see it.