The Institute by Stephen King - anyone else read it? (open spoilers)

Cafe Society
21

Another long-time SK fan here. At 13, I saw the Kubrick Shining and came home too scared to sleep, so I decided I might as well start reading the book. Poor decision sleep-wise but it led to countless hours of pleasure over the years.

I think everything he’s ever published has been at least pretty good. I’d put this one top half. Maybe top quarter if I reread the last hundred pages or so and they make more sense the second time.

The characters were vividly drawn and likable/detestable, the plot was fast-moving and suspenseful and the setting horrifically creepy. I was really into this book most of the way, and the twin climactic scenes in South Carolina and back at the Institute were gripping, but the ending just sort of petered out. In particular, this may not reflect well on me, but after 300 pages of children being sadistically abused, I was ready for the abusers to get punished at some length in graphic detail. I was actually sort of hoping for the book to end with some trial or hearing scene like the end of the Dragon Tattoo trilogy, with Luke brilliantly foiling the villains’ last-ditch to cover up their crimes. But instead, everyone just sort of shrugged and dispersed.

Also, although the climactic scenes were exciting to read at the time, neither of them were really very plausible, even given the degree of disbelief-suspension a book like this demands.


I couldn’t figure out how Luke was going to escape from the retrieval team, given that the good guys clearly had no realistic chance of beating them in a fight; and then it just turned out that they did so, anyway. Meanwhile, back at the Institute…it’s THAT easy to magnify a kid’s power to building-crushing levels just by accident? And this had somehow never happened before?

Mahaloth, how many books about kids being abducted and experimented on do you read? :pYou make it sound like it’s a whole subgenre.

I thought the structural gimmick worked; get the DuPray crowd established as characters at the start, so you don’t have to interrupt the real story to introduce them when they come in. I liked Tim and his friends fine, but Luke Ellis was a great King lead character and the soul of the book. Stackhouse wasn’t wrong when he called Tim “some generic hero the kid picked up along the way” (not a direct quote). I think I would have been found it irritating to have the hair-raising Institute narrative interrupted by chapters about Tim’s job interview and the mini-mart stickup.

Given the extreme evil, large hi-tech operation exploiting psychic children motif, I was kind of expecting some Easter-eggy allusion to the Crimson King, but I don’t see that having one would have actually made the book any better.

TLDR: 3 1/2 rectal thermometers out of 5.

22

So you LOVE him except for, like 4/5 of his books? (IIRC Cujo was the last book he wrote before getting sober…somewhere around then, anyway)

23

Just finished it. As other Stephen King fans have stated upthread, I’m a longtime big fan but I recognize his weaknesses and occasional uneven writing trajectory – I’m one of the ones who couldn’t finish Sleeping Beauties – literally abandoned it about halfway through.

That said, I don’t get the disappointment and the disdain some have expressed for this book. I found it enjoyable storytelling right from the start that pretty much continued to the end. The biggest weakness was perhaps that some of the climactic events were just a bit over-the-top implausible (and it had a few corny lines), but it was still a fun story that kept me reading through most of last night. It may be that SK’s best writing is now behind him, but while this is certainly not his best work it’s nice to see something like this that’s a bit of an uptick.

24

You made it farther than I did. I got about 50 pages in and couldn’t go on. But to be fair, I’m convinced SK didn’t do a lot of the main writing in it. His son seems a lot more enamored with being “literary” than his dad, resulting in a lot of long-winded, boring prose. King, despite the fact that he writes doorstops, knows how to get into the action.