The Institute

The Institute is a novel by the American writer Stephen King, published in 2019 by Scribner. It is a science fiction and horror story rather than one of his supernatural novels, and it followed a run of books in which he wrote about institutions and the people who work inside them.

Luke Ellis is twelve and unusually clever, and his parents are killed at the start of the book so that he can be taken to the Institute, a facility where children with telepathy and telekinesis are studied. The children are housed in what the staff call the Front Half, with rooms modelled on their bedrooms at home and doors they cannot open, and Luke learns that residents who are deemed to have progressed are moved to the Back Half, from which nobody returns. Among them are Kalisha, Nick, George, Iris and ten-year-old Avery Dixon, and King spends the middle of the novel on how children manage to keep their sense of themselves in a place built to remove it. The other half of the story belongs to the adults on the outside, including a former policeman who begins looking into a disappearance nobody else will take seriously.

King had set earlier novels in similarly closed institutions, and this one uses the machinery of a secret research programme as the source of the horror rather than the supernatural.