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Book Review: The Institute by Stephen King

The Institute, by Stephen King

Scribner, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-9821-1056-7

Available: Hardcover, Kindle edition, audiobook

 

The Institute is entry number fiftysomething in the catalogue of He Who Cannot Stop Writing, better known as Stephen King.  As he has been wont to do since 2010’s Full Dark, No Stars, King continues to mine the vein of psychological horror, finding true evil in the inhuman actions that normal, rational human beings foist on each other.  King doesn’t need vampires, hotels with a mind of their own or undead children with scalpels to do so: he finds plenty of ugliness with the insanity of everyday people.  The Institute isn’t on the level of his unholy trinity of The Shining, The Stand,  and ‘Salem’s Lot, but it’s still a very good read, and one that would be considered outstanding for any other author.  It’s clear that over 40 years into his career, King still has an iron grip on his claim to being America’s best writer, and he isn’t likely to relinquish the throne anytime soon.

The first 40 pages consist of following Tim Jamieson, an ex-cop drifting through life, who  winds up in the tiny hick town of Dupray, South Carolina and takes a King-created job as a night knocker, someone who walks the town from dusk till dawn, checking business doors and keeping an eye out for trouble.  The story stays here just long enough to get the scenario set and characters developed, then  jumps to Minnesota, with a completely different thread and set of characters.  It’s a testament to King’s skill that he’s able to do this.  He creates interest in an ordinary situation and location, gets it all developed, and then shifts gears to something completely unrelated, but no less interesting.  Phase 2 focuses on Luke Ellis, a child genius. who at the age of 12 is taking the entrance exams to MIT, the country’s most famous genius farm.  Luke is kidnapped and his parents killed one night, and he wakes up in a lockdown hospital/research unit in northern Maine known as The Institute.  Luke and the other children are subjected to various tests, beatings and tortures, as their captors seek to exploit extra-sensory abilities that most of the kids didn’t even know they had.  Of course, their handlers have their own nefarious reasons for their actions.  Eventually, the Maine and South Carolina threads tie together, and the story barrels through a thrilling conclusion.

As often happens with King, this one is yet ANOTHER page turner that is hard to put down.  A great deal of King’s skill lies in making any character at all seem interesting and worth the reader getting emotionally attached to.  Even the minor characters, like security guards and homeless people are completely developed, and you want to know what happens to them, no matter how small their role in the story.  The dialogue is perfect, whether the characters are southerners or New Englanders.  King clearly does his research, and gets all the little nuances and mannerisms perfect when the characters are conversing or taking actions.  The other area where he shines, as always, is in creating settings that make perfect sense, down to the last detail.  Everything fits, whether it’s detailing an escape plan or describing the methods used to physically and mentally abuse children.  He never leaves room for unbelievability, it all seems completely plausible.  King’s unequaled skill at all of the above is the main reason he’s been on top of the mountain for so long.  Of course, none of this matters unless the story is exciting, and it is.  It’s a fast burn of a story, and maintains a quick clip through its 500 plus pages.  There are no sections that drag, it all flies fast and keeps you turning pages.

The Institute is yet another winner from the author with the most consistent track record of excellence in American literary history.  If you’re a King fan, you’ll like it, and non-fans would also be likely to enjoy this one.

Recommended.

 

Reviewed by Murray Samuelson

 

 

 

Posted on January 18, 2020 by , Reply

Musings: Stephen King Gets Schooled on Diversity in the Media

Awards are not the end-all and be-all, but they do have meaning: libraries make purchases based on lists of award winners and recommended titles, and so do readers. When a well-regarded organization hands out an award, there is a ripple where often that book, or movie, or theater production, will also be held in high regard and rise to the top. It might even stay there decades later, after it has become dated or recognized as problematic (true of a number of early Newbery and Caldecott winners).

Many award-granting institutions have undergone upheavals in the past dozen years or so: debate over the World Fantasy Award Fantasy Award, the Sad Puppies fiasco that attempted to taint the Hugo Awards, the renaming of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award, the recent cancelling of the RITA Awards. There has also been a more obvious scrutiny of the Oscars, starting with the #OscarsSoWhite hashtag. Any hope that public criticism of the Oscars’ lack of diversity would have an impact on judges’ considerations was dashed this year  as the Oscars failed to nominate any woman for Best Director, just three nominations for artists of color, and, despite acclaim for both Us and Midsommar, zero nominations from the horror genre (I’m also baffled that Frozen 2 didn’t get a nomination for Best Animated Feature: it is a gorgeous film).

I haven’t felt like the Oscars were worth my attention for years, but with Joker, The Irishman, 1917, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood racking up the nominations even I couldn’t escape the blinding whiteness and maleness of the slate. It has to make you question, are Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino really the only directors capable of making an Oscar-worthy movie? I know  women and people of color are making great movies, and that there are outstanding horror movies that deserve a look. There are stories out there being told from a fresh point of view that deserve to be seen and heard.

Author Stephen King is a judge, and decided this was the time to put himself out there and tell us:

 

I guess now that he’s won the Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, he’s become on authority on what makes quality art. Which is apparently not diversity?  Twitter does not seem to agree.

He later backtracked a little, saying everyone deserves “a fair shot”, whatever that means (marginalized people start with less than a fair shot so..?). Here we’ve got an old white guy (he comes within a day of sharing a birthday with my mom, who is in her seventies) who has locked down the bestseller lists for decades.  There can’t be too many people who haven’t heard of Stephen King, read one of his books, or watched a movie adaptation. At this point in his life, could he identify a fair shot if it walked up to him and tapped him on the nose? How many promising writers could have “New York Bestselling Author” on the cover of their books if King didn’t have a permanent place there?

Stephen King is positioned in publishing in a way that he could make a big difference in making available quality work from diverse and #OwnVoices creators, maybe not so much in the movies, but definitely in fiction. My background is mostly as a K-12 librarian, and maybe you aren’t familiar with the authors for that age group, but one of the big names is Rick Riordan, who gained his recognition writing contemporary fantasy with kids who discover they are demigods from various world mythologies. Riordan was able to use his privilege as a popular, bestselling, writer to start a publishing imprint with the specific mission of finding #OwnVoices authors who have stories to tell grounded in their own mythologies and legends. Riordan is a name, but he certainly isn’t in Stephen King’s league when it comes to name recognition, number of books written, or number of copies sold. For King to say he would never consider diversity, but only quality, is a blind spot I hope is rectified by the reaction to his tweet. Because he has the ability to find and promote #OwnVoices creators in a way that most writers do not. And it would be wonderful if he did.

Posted on January 15, 2020 by , Reply

Book Review: The Poe Estate (The Grimm Legacy, Book 3) by Polly Shulman

The Poe Estate (The Grimm Legacy, Book 3) by Polly Shulman

Nancy Paulsen Books, 2015

ISBN-13: 978-0399166143

Available: Hardcover, Kindle edition, audiobook, audio CD

 

This, sadly, is the last book in a trilogy where the real star is not any particular character, but the New-York Circulating Material Repository, a combination library/museum/pocket dimension of fictional objects. The first book, The Grimm Legacy, introduced high school students Elizabeth Rew and Andre Merritt, who were hired to work as pages in the Repository, as they discovered magical objects from fairytales and fantasy. The second book, The Wells Bequest, introduces science geek Leo Novikov and explores fictional objects found in science fiction tales. This third book, The Poe Estate, ventures into the world of Gothic and early horror fiction. It takes place years later, after Elizabeth has become a librarian. She and Andre travel New England looking for haunted objects and houses to store in the repository’s Poe Annex (a detail I loved was that in order to reach the Poe Annex, visitors must first travel through the Lovecraft Corpus, which is just as creepy and atmospherically terrifying as you would expect). However, unlike the first two books, we get a first-person narrator, sixth grader Sukie, whose protective older sister Kitty died from an inherited blood disease from her mother’s side of the family, the Thornes.  Kitty haunts Sukie, still compelled to protect her even after death. Sukie and her parents, suffering financially, move into Thorne Mansion, which is in a sad state of disrepair, with their mother’s very elderly cousin, Hepzibah Thorne, and Sukie soon discovers another ghost haunting the house.  After meeting Elizabeth and Andre at a flea market, Sukie discovers that the house, and members of her family from generations past, appeared in an unfinished Gothic novel. Sukie, Andre, and Elizabeth go on a treasure hunt, passing through the Lovecraft Corpus, visiting the Spectral Library (a fictional library with a ghostly librarian, containing fictional books that exists inside a story: examples of fictional books include the Necronomicon and The King in Yellow, both of which are better handled by a ghost than a human being), and traveling through the Poe Annex, which contains not just haunted houses, but haunted ships, haunted trains, and haunted islands. There are enough Easter eggs in this book to give any fan of Gothic and early horror fiction plenty to delight in, and the metanarrative is kind of fascinating, although it’s also somewhat confusing.

I personally am absolutely delighted to see the names of some of these lesser-known stories (such as “Afterward” by Edith Wharton and “The Wind in the Rose-Bush” by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman) and authors appear in a middle grade novel, and I love the Repository and its collections. However, Sukie’s story as a girl dealing with grief over the death of her sister, financial difficulties at home, and bullying at school, whose elderly cousin is being pursued by unscrupulous developers, gets shafted by the author’s need to incorporate the Repository into the narrative. Jonathan Rigby, the villain from previous books, doesn’t get much space in the story, and the conflicts and relationships don’t get the attention they deserve. Sukie’s story is definitely a middle-grade story, but its intersection with the Repository storyline mostly derails it in favor of dropping names that might not be familiar even to many adults. Shulman could get away with this in The Grimm Legacy, because most kids have a basic familiarity with fairytales, but I don’t think it works here.

If you are an adult who loves the idea of  fantastic libraries or getting to step into favorite stories (visiting the House of Usher, flying on a broom from Young Goodman Brown, tracking down Captain Kidd’s treasure) then this is a really fun book.  Unfortunately, I think a lot of it will go over the target audience’s head. Polly Shulman does provide a list of authors and titles mentioned in the text, and she got me interested enough in Hawthorne to look some of his stories up (The Scarlet Letter successfully turned me off to Hawthorne in high school), but I have trouble seeing kids in elementary or early middle school  actively seeking these stories out on their own. This isn’t great writing, but it’s a lovely tribute with an enjoyable concept,  one of those books that is best shared between an adult who loves the genre and the kids in their lives.

 

Posted on January 14, 2020 by , Reply
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