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.
Carrie by Stephen King (1974): King's first published novel still has zing. Or zip. Or whatever. It's not particularly representative of his work as a whole, though its telekinetic namesake is representative of a lot of King novels from the first ten years of his novels.
Carrie gives us a powerful telekinetic; The Shining gives us a boy and a man who are both telepathic and precognitive; The Dead Zone gives us a precognitive man; Firestarter gives us a pyrokinetic girl. King's interest in psychic abilities seems very much a product of the similarly interested 1970's America. I'm surprised he didn't do a novel involving pyramid power.
Carrie also features atypical King narration, a combination of third-person omniscient and 'clippings' from fictional books, magazines, and letters. It works, though just barely: some suspense is leeched out of the text by our knowledge that something extraordinarily dire is going to happen from pretty much the first page onwards. Of course, the movie strips these documentarian elements away, leaving only the high-school narrative that is Carrie's greatest strength.
King himself noted that in going back to Carrie after Columbine, he found her much less sympathetic than he remembered. Pitiful, perhaps, and warped by persecution and a loopy, homicidal mother, but not sympathetic. Anyone who has been an outcast can feel pangs of horror at Carrie's sad life, but she's ultimately no more sympathetic than John Gardner's Grendel, and much less so than Anthony Burgess's Alex in A Clockwork Orange.
This is still a tight, fascinating read (it may be King's shortest novel). Separated from high school as a student by a few short years and as a teacher not at all, King conjures up a world that's a nightmare for students who are low in the pecking order, where even a good deed can lead to horrible consequences. Recommended.
