The Institute by Stephen King review – tested thrills with a topical spin
“Ever been to Pleasure Island?” asks Lampwick, the rowdy, doomed delinquent from Disney’s Pinocchio, as the stagecoach spirits a cargo of children through the darkened streets and clear out of the world. At Pleasure Island, behind high, bolted gates, the town’s tearaways are promised a life free from societal interference. They can drink and smoke and shoot pool at their leisure, blissfully unaware that the theme park is, in fact, a nightmarish factory or sulphurous processing plant. Come daybreak they will have been transformed into donkeys, herded into crates and put to work in the mines.
Misguided or not, the kids in Pinocchio are at least clamouring to visit Pleasure Island, which is more than can be said for the pint-sized inmates of Stephen King’s meaty, satisfying slab of high-concept pulp fiction. Instead, its inhabitants are forcibly abducted from their homes at night and installed as laboratory rats by a shadowy government organisation. They’re plied with cigarettes and alcohol. They’re being slowly fattened for the kill. And if The Institute finally lacks the pure jolting terror of Lampwick’s transformation into a jackass, it compensates with an atmosphere of creeping dread and a keen awareness of the cogs and wheels of bureaucratic evil. King’s villains, it transpires, are a bunch of middle-management automatons, headhunted from the US military or plucked from well-paid careers at Halliburton. These people wouldn’t consider themselves to be sadists, exactly. They’re simply clocking in and out, following orders and processing kids.
The latest lamb to the slaughter is 12-year-old Luke Ellis, a child prodigy with mild telekinetic powers who awakens one morning at a cinder-block compound in the backwoods of Maine. Ellis and his fellow prisoners (some telekinetic, some telepathic) are here to be weaponised – made over as “psychic drones” to be deployed in an opaque geopolitical struggle. Mrs Sigsby, the compound’s icy boss, insists that the children view themselves as American heroes. But once they’ve been sent into battle, the evidence suggests that they’re not meant to come home.
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In casting about to get their bearings, the Institute’s inmates helpfully reference Pleasure Island and the witch’s cage from Hansel and Gretel. They might also have cited Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, another dystopian tale of battery-farmed children. Hell, while they’re about it, they might even namecheck some previous Stephen King publications – specifically Firestarter, The Shining, Dreamcatcher and Carrie. After more than 50 profitable years in the business, the author has long since hit the point where he’s circling back on himself, revisiting themes he’s covered in the past (in this case supernatural children and a mammoth dark-state conspiracy). The success of The Institute, though, is in the way it repurposes this familiar material to spotlight a 21st-century US in crisis; corrupted and compromised and mired in debt. The Institute sits alone in the woods. But it’s symptomatic of a wider malaise.
No doubt this is why, midway through the tale, King conspires to send the imperilled Ellis under the fence and back into the world. The kid rafts downriver like Huck Finn, hides out on a boxcar like a hobo and eventually alights in an impoverished backwater burgh in the south. The small town, of course, remains King’s natural wheelhouse, his happy hunting ground, an abiding preoccupation alongside kids with supernatural powers. DuPray, South Carolina, contains a freight yard, a Waffle House and a convenience store that’s managed by two Somalian brothers. There is a depressed barber who sits out on his front porch every night, and a struggling motel owner who’s not entirely to be trusted. Every household owns a gun. Every resident has too much time on their hands. DuPray, in other words, is the nation in microcosm, perched at a crossroads, torn between its best and worst impulses. The runaway child needs a shelter. Mrs Sigsby’s goons are on their way. On sleepy Main Street, outside the sheriff’s office, one has the sense of America weighing up its options and deciding which way it should jump.
• The Institute by Stephen King is published by Hodder & Stoughton (£20). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
