I’m gonna preface this review by saying that Misery is my favorite Stephen King novel. It has a great premise, limited but strong characters, and a realistic setting—most of which takes place in a bedroom. Famous author meets with a life-threatening collision in a remote location during a snowstorm and is saved by his number one fan who happens to live in the area—charming and unhinged ex-nurse Annie Wilkes. It’s all downhill from there.

So after years of not reading any of King’s novels, but seeing a lot of movies based off of them, I picked up The Institute one evening while browsing a bookstore. Maybe it’s time to get back into fiction, I thought to myself. Can’t go wrong with the master of horror.

Except you can. Stephen King can’t write dialogue for child characters. Not in The Institute, anyway. The story revolves around genius adolescents with superpowers who are kidnapped from their homes and held captive in a secret government center where they are subjected to abuse and exploitation. Brilliant kids can be interesting, I suppose, but brilliant kids who speak like adults like child-actor-era Dakota Fanning if she was from the 1940s are irritating, in real life or fiction. They’re unlikable and you stop feeling bad for them at some point because they have superpowers and are made to seem more adult than the adults in the story.

It’s unsettling and makes it difficult to connect with the characters when they’re children with limited life experience who’re supposed to be innocent and uncorrupted by the world. No doubt superhero kids are also a culturally American thing—adolescents being forced to go up against evil and take on the responsibilities of “adults” who’ve failed them. It’s unnatural no matter how much liberals try to push this idea.

The world has seen this more recently with school shootings around the US—Stoneman Douglas High School in particular. There’s something disturbing about children being made to be both the victims and heroes in a society run by grown-ups.

The bad guys in the story are really just that—bad. And a lot of people are that. A lot of people also lack depth, so maybe the bad characters at the institute are just one-dimensional types, considering their lack of any real presence or complexity. They say bad guy things and are cruel and the kids don’t like them—standard stuff. If you’re looking for a story with intense characters that provide psychological insight into the antagonist’s mindset and actions, The Institute ain’t it.

The beginning of the story had promise, namely with the character of ex-cop Tim Jamieson and his backstory. Actually, the whole fictional town of Du Pray, South Carolina is more interesting than the institute, where most of the story takes place. Seemingly crucial characters are introduced and then disappear, only resurfacing by the end of the novel, which is a waste of good characters and setting.

Sheriff John in particular is the sort of underdog character you hope will save the day, what with his Quantico training that was mentioned and wisdom not being put to any good use in a small town that sees no action. But when his character finally re-emerges, just as things start to get heated, he doesn’t stick around for long.

I wondered if the good reviews the book received had more to do with its political relevance than the quality of the work. Released in September 2019 amidst a turbulent American political climate, jabs against Donald Trump cropped up here and there in the novel. I can see how that could be off-putting to some readers who don’t appreciate using their polarizing president as the butt of jokes during times of constant clashing. Sometimes you just want to read a book to leave current events behind for a while. Wokeness should have a time and place because it’s not a universally embraced ideology.

Some people see the premise of children imprisoned at a government facility directly inspired by the real-life kids “kept in cages” at the US border, highlighting the cruelty of the Trump administration. Listen, no matter how good or bad of a writer you are, it’s gross when a controversial issue is presented disingenuously. Doing so is to assume that your readers are halfwits.

If there’s anything that’s considered truly insulting it’s to assume that your audience is dumb and can be fed inaccuracies. It’s the author’s story, but abusing your influence as a famous figure to further an emotional narrative is akin to shitty writing. The rest of us who don’t subscribe to the hysterical left that opposes what represents anything that differs from their opinions, delusions, and interpretations are supposed to ignore the fact that holding children in detention centers (or “cages,” depending on who you ask and in regards to which administration) was a move first introduced during Barack Obama’s presidency. The author insults him or herself by doing this as well.

The Institute is 576 pages, probably due to the amount of repetition meant to stress the cruelty committed against children, but it really just gets boring and unoriginal after a while. Three hundred pages or even less would’ve sufficed, and it probably could’ve been a more powerful story. Writing horror about children or teens is tricky, I think because it requires a lot of precision of details. Maybe King got it right in previous novels like The Body, It, or even Carrie. The Institute, however, was a tedious read.

Scary factor: 4/10