Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

An author can obsess over the same story as many times as they wish, as long as they continue to change the narrative, the setting and the drama, it is after all within their power to set the tale anyway they wish if it means the reader is hooked on the detail; what must always alter is the flow, the discussion and the frank exchange of how the world responds.

Stephen King has perhaps written more about the subjects of telepathy and telekinesis than he has about those creatures that wait in the closets of our mind that scratch at the door and will their way to the outside world in the forms of imaginative vampires and psychotic aliens who get a kick out dressing up as a clown; and yet the subject matter he seeks has always been one that wants to understand more, that wishes the reader to seek out, not of the monster waiting to devour us, but that of the human mind which we neglect and do not truly understand.

Stephen King’s latest novel The Institute falls squarely into the field of the mysterious and the unexplained, the feeling that we have barely scratched the surface of how we are altered by circumstances and the determination of others to control our mind. It is in this realm that Stephen King arguably has more scope to work, away from the systematic horror and in the place in which he can offer the true evil that surrounds us, manipulation, the schemes of madmen and the dire consequences of women who believe in a cause that many of quite rightly would find abhorrent.

However, The Institute is also one that is not frightened to draw comparisons that run deep between that of Nazi Germany and the current administration that sits at the heart of the United States of America, indeed the writer has been earnestly vocal in this thoughts of the growing unease, almost bordering on civil war rhetoric, that is placed between the right and left of the country’s devolving political ideals.

There is also belief, an unwavering thought that runs through such books, like Carrie, Firestarter, The Shining and Doctor Sleep, that the mind is ultimately resilient to such revolting subjection and tests, the fear that we are not in control of our intelligence and perhaps in the modern day standard of how we have become slaves ourselves to the system, of continual social media and unfounded opinions.

It is this that marks The Institute out as being a perfect example of what can be envisaged when a writer closely associated with the horror genre can bring to the table when not encumbered by the thought of ghouls and imagined terror, for the real horror is not in the rising of the dead but that of being used by Government agencies as nothing more than a battery, a conduit to do its bidding.

An enjoyable read, thrilling in its delivery. It might not have the passion of The Shining, or the sincerity of conclusion that comes with Doctor Sleep, but nevertheless it is one that allows the reader to feel the unease for their children and what some people are willing to do in the name of science.

Ian D. Hall