We all need to listen” ( The Washington Post). But no one has ever escaped from the Institute.Īs psychically terrifying as Firestarter, and with the spectacular kid power of It, The Institute is “first-rate entertainment that has something important to say. As each new victim disappears to Back Half, Luke becomes more and more desperate to get out and get help. If you go along, you get tokens for the vending machines. Sigsby, and her staff are ruthlessly dedicated to extracting from these children the force of their extranormal gifts. In this most sinister of institutions, the director, Mrs. Others, Luke learns, graduated to Back Half, “like the roach motel,” Kalisha says. And outside his door are other doors, behind which are other kids with special talents-telekinesis and telepathy-who got to this place the same way Luke did: Kalisha, Nick, George, Iris, and ten-year-old Avery Dixon.

Luke will wake up at The Institute, in a room that looks just like his own, except there’s no window. The operation takes less than two minutes. In the middle of the night, in a house on a quiet street in suburban Minneapolis, intruders silently murder Luke Ellis’s parents and load him into a black SUV. From #1 New York Times bestselling author Stephen King whose “storytelling transcends genre” ( Newsday) comes “another winner: creepy and touching and horrifyingly believable” ( The Boston Globe) about a group of kids confronting evil.

The institute a novel