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The Institute by Stephen King: a Review

 


I wouldn’t call The Institute by Stephen King a horror story. There is a bit of paranormal activity in it, but evil that we see does not come from the people who possess paranormal powers, but from others who control them. The people who have psychic abilities are all children. The real horror of this story is that those children are kidnapped and abused.

The main character in the story is Luke, a twelve-year-old who has a remarkable brain. The kid is a budding genius who even though he is in a school for the gifted, has moved beyond what that school can teach him. In the next year he plans on entering MIT to study engineering and Emerson to study English at the same time! But he is kidnapped and taken to a mysterious institution in the backcountry of Maine where he meets other kids who have also been kidnapped. Has Luke been taken because of his remarkable brain? No. The Institute doesn’t care about that. They only care that he has a mild ability to move small objects with his mind. In this story it is only children (and only a small fraction of those) who can have telepathic or telekinetic talent, so it is only children who are kidnapped.

King is an expert at building tension. We see the planning for a big event from a long way off. As events progress, you can feel the tension swelling, surging. Step by step, our anticipation mounts. You don’t need any encouragement to keep turning the pages. And this being Stephen King, you don’t know who is going to survive and who is not. That means all outcomes are on the table. That makes it unpredictable.

--Spoiler alert—

The people at the institute consider Luke just another child. They did not worry about the fact that he was a genius. Perhaps they should have. When it looks like Luke and his friends might actually be able to bring down the institute, they are told this will bring about the end of the world, that these children and others like them perform a valuable service to the world, that they have stopped nuclear war many times by proactively eliminating threats that other psychics have foretold will cause disaster. For example, the minister they had been about to kill (or cause him to take his own life) would in ten years’ time, become friends with the Secretary of Defense and convince him that war was imminent, setting the world on the path to destruction.  And this same type of scenario had happened repeatedly over the past sixty years, always thwarted by children at these institutes. Okay, this explanation is one that I am surprised none of the characters called bullshit on. I mean you have ten years! Even if you accept that the prediction is true, you have ten years to take this person out without resorting to torturing dozens of children to death to achieve it. Haven’t they ever heard of a simple assassination? That was the elephant in the room for me. I was screaming at Luke and Tim that there were simpler ways of dealing with these problems.

But in the end, this becomes a story about whether the means are justified by the ends. The institute would argue that harming and eventual death of hundreds of children is more than offset by the fact that billions get to live. The world gets to continue. Our heroes would argue that nothing justifies harming children. I am reminded of a verse in Matthew: “What will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul?” Yes, maybe that is why “bullshit” isn’t called on the institute’s justification. Because ultimately that allows this exploration in moral philosophy. King gets to ask the more important question that the characters (and the readers) have to answer: which is more important, the ends or the means?

Star Liner

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