{"id":2026,"date":"2019-09-16T12:00:48","date_gmt":"2019-09-16T02:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/?p=2026"},"modified":"2019-10-07T23:01:19","modified_gmt":"2019-10-07T12:01:19","slug":"book-review-the-institute-stephen-king","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/?p=2026","title":{"rendered":"Book Review: The Institute \u00e2\u20ac\u201d Stephen King"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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In The Institute<\/em>, we unlock the paradox of Stephen King: much of his best work is familiar and comfortable, echoing across the years, spanning decades. However, there is such a thing as too <\/em>familiar: when King uses one his skeletons but forgets to put the muscle on the bones, the books suffer. The Institute <\/em>is the ghost of a Stephen King novel: it has the spirit, but not the flesh. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s fine<\/em>, but it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not much more than that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Acting on a hunch, somewhat disgraced policeman Tim Jamieson arrives in the small town of DuPray and takes up a job as a night knocker. There we leave him and shift to Luke Ellis, a preternaturally intelligent child with latent telekinetic activity. Unfortunately a shadowy organisation known only as The Institute collects children like Luke, and he is placed in their system. Once on the inside, however, Luke wants out \u00e2\u20ac\u201d and the Institute has provided Luke with exactly the right tools to achieve that goal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Institute <\/em>begins with promise: a drifter shows up in a small town and settles himself in. But King forgets that we like to read about small towns and the people who populate them, and we leave them behind like so much table setting. When we eventually get back to them \u00e2\u20ac\u201d their story not allowed to be told in tandem with Luke\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s until many hundreds of pages later \u00e2\u20ac\u201d we don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t get to know them. There is one character, Tim\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s love interest, whose only real characteristic is that she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not cut out for police work. That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s it for the whole novel. As King settings go, DuPray isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t really a place so much as a staging ground, a cardboard film set with extras milling around and waiting for their squibs to go off.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So instead we have to rely on Luke, and he shows promise, along with his fellow victims in the grand conspiracy. The thing is that on the outside he is incredibly clever, has an eidetic memory, and can move pizza trays with his mind when he gets stressed; on the inside all of his smarts count for nothing, and he is flattened into just another kid. There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s nothing exceptional about him and, unlike other King wunderkinds<\/em>, none of these children can do anything much despite their ripeness for harvest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet the group of children together aren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t without their charms, and the bond that they form is real. Their situation is static, however, much of the story is confined to the one location, and the screws who run the place are barely sketched in. The Institute itself sounds suspiciously like Firestarter<\/em>\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s The Shop, but once we realise that it is most emphatically not tied in to Firestarter \u00e2\u20ac\u201d <\/em>or any other King novel save a name check that we get so often now that it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s amazing that nothing has been done with that location in forty years \u00e2\u20ac\u201d interest wanes. The Institute<\/em>\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s US cover has one of the more arresting images in recent publishing history, but the contents never really live up to that one moment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Institute <\/em>is a book in which one character says that polite society no longer allows people to be called morons; the same character will then go on to call a miscalculation on their part \u00e2\u20ac\u0153maximo retardo\u00e2\u20ac\u009d not once, but twice. King is a sentimental man, and The Institute <\/em>was written for his grandchildren. Perhaps this is how they talk, but it is at least eleven years too late to be having a discussion about the dreaded \u00e2\u20ac\u0153r word\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. It doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t make Luke seem more endearing or give him the innocence of childhood: it smacks of a 72 year old man trying for a juvenile voice and failing in an embarrassing fashion. Given that King is famous for his empathy and understanding of the developing mind, and that The Institute <\/em>is about children, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a misstep. It may only show up twice, but it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s enough to give The Institute <\/em>a sour taste, emblematic of its general mishandling of character notes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Still, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not fair to say that The Institute <\/em>is a failure on King\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s part: there are some intriguing revelations towards the end; not all of the character work is a bust; the climax returns King to his patented juggling of multiple character sets, some of which are quite affecting; and the whole generally holds together even when it doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t soar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Institute <\/em>has so many of the ingredients that normally constitute a premium Stephen King novel, but they fail to rise. If the reader were allowed to get more of a feel for DuPray and its people, then the two worlds might have meshed into a satisfying conclusion. There are elements that work, but more that fizzle. The Institute <\/em>isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t a waste of time, but it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not King at the top of his game; the 2010s have not been unkind to the man, but this is a bit of a bummer to end the decade on.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In The Institute, we unlock the paradox of Stephen King: much of his best work is familiar and comfortable, echoing across the years, spanning decades. However, there is such a thing as too familiar: when King uses one his skeletons but forgets to put the muscle on the bones, the books suffer. The Institute is the ghost of a Stephen King novel: it has the spirit, but not the flesh. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s fine, but it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not much more than that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2027,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,285],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2026","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books","category-stephen-king-books","has_thumb"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/keep\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/10\/The-Institute-banner.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1HLZ6-wG","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2026","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2026"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2026\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2031,"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2026\/revisions\/2031"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2027"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2026"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2026"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2026"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}