Content levels
Trigger warnings
Positive tags
Protagonist archetypes
Tropes
Themes
Synopsis
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. The operation takes less than two minutes. Luke will wake up at The Institute, in a room that looks just like his own, except there’s no window. 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. They are all in Front Half. Others, Luke learns, graduated to Back Half, “like the roach motel,” Kalisha says. “You check in, but you don’t check out.” In this most sinister of institutions, the director, Mrs. Sigsby, and her staff are ruthlessly dedicated to extracting from these children the force of their extranormal gifts. There are no scruples here. If you go along, you get tokens for the vending machines. If you don’t, punishment is brutal. As each new victim disappears to Back Half, Luke becomes more and more desperate to get out and get help. But no one has ever escaped from the Institute. As psychically terrifying as Firestarter, and with the spectacular kid power of It, The Institute is Stephen King’s gut-wrenchingly dramatic story of good vs. evil in a world where the good guys don’t always win.
The Institute: content & age rating
Intended for adult readers (18+).
Parents should know this book contains graphic violence against children, murder of parents on-page, child abduction, institutional torture, and psychological abuse in a government facility that experiments on kidnapped children with psychic powers.
What to know going in
This book has strong violence, no sexual content, and moderate language. Content notes include child abuse, child harm, torture, institutional abuse, and murder (see the full list above).
Who'll love this
Adult readers will be gripped by this terrifying thriller about kids with special powers fighting against their captors in a sinister institution.