The Institute (2019) by Stephen King: Novel: Stephen King returns to the world of psychic children in his new novel with mostly positive results.
The eponymous Institute kidnaps children and puts them to work doing... what? Well, if I told you, I'd spoil the novel. Suffice to say that the people behind the Institute believe that the ends justify the means and that they're the good guys.
They really must think they're the good guys because they've been killing a whole lot of children for decades. And their families. King remains fairly ruthless throughout the novel, making things seem more plausible. There's a heck of a death toll, both depicted and implied, and the vast majority of those deaths are children between the ages of about 8 and 14.
But soon after the novel begins, the Institute makes one mistake -- they kidnap a boy genius. They didn't kidnap him because he's a boy genius. Human intelligence is irrelevant to their aims. Well, until it interferes with them.
King plays a bit with structure in the novel, beginning with a secondary protagonist -- a former police officer who goes walkabout and ends up as the Night Knocker in a small Southern town. After about 50 pages, we jump to our primary protagonist. A beginning writer would probably be told not to do this shift. But King can do what he wants -- and the structure does cause suspense insofar as we wonder how events in demon-haunted Maine (where the Institute is located) and the Southern whistle-stop will dovetail.
In all, it's enjoyable and fairly tight. The characterization of the children is typically astute. And the characterization of the assorted antagonists, while occasionally one-note, makes sense when one considers that they're people doing terrible things for what they believe is a noble cause. That's going to disconnect one from empathy -- or require people with low empathy from the get-go. It's also the only King novel I can think of in which probability calculations play a major role. Recommended.
The Rosedale Horror (1980) by Jon Ruddy: This Canadian paperback original from defunct Canadian paperback imprint Paperjacks is shocking in its goodness. It's a haunted-house story with a twist, set in Toronto's tony Rosedale neighbourhood in 1974. Ruddy was a long-time newspaper reporter, and it shows: he grounds all the horror elements in detailed, specific, and often quite funny and illuminating glimpses of life at a failing Toronto newspaper in the 1970's.
The specifics of newspaper work on a variety of fronts from daily news columnist to police reporter to freelance writer give the proceedings a real verisimilitude. That the book is often scathingly funny about life at a tabloid and about Toronto the Good really helps things.
Ruddy also carries off a difficult bit of structure. The Rosedale Horror is told in six sections, each focused in the third-person on a specific character, though there is also some first-person narration by way of a tape recorder. And it all works both as characterization and as a builder of suspense.
There are elements in the text which at times seem sexist. Some of them fall into the realm of a sort of R-rated Leacockian satire directed at certain men and women alike, including a female relationship columnist and a male news columnist. Ultimately, the novel isn't sexist, though some of its characters are sexist and, in a couple of cases, somewhat predatory.
Ruddy manages several scenes of horror shot through with the occasional bit of grotesque humour. That tape-recorded first-person monologue is one of the two deftest bits of horror, revealing gradually a mind both ill and toxically malign. A rape scene also manages to horrify without seeming exploitative -- no small feat in any novel, and Ruddy amplifies the effect by having the rapist himself under the malign mental influence of something awful.
The Rosedale Horror certainly has its pulpy elements, but they never undercut the horror and the comedic in Ruddy's novel. As both horror and pointed, satiric social commentary, The Rosedale Horror is far superior to many, many novels I've read by far more celebrated authors. It's also hard to go wrong with a novel in which a character is murdered by being telepathically forced to urinate on the third rail of the Toronto subway line. Recommended.
