This has been on my shelves since it came out so I know I'm very late to the party in reading this one.
The story opens with an ex-city cop Tim Jamieson choosing randomly to take a payment to leave an overbooked plane and travel by rail up the country. he stops and settles in a small town in the arse end of nowhere in South Carolina, getting a job with the local police force.
Meanwhile, across the country, a genius boy, Luke Ellis, is kidnapped in the middle of the night and his family murdered.
He wakes to find himself in The Institute of the title. His intellect is not his only gift. His other gift is the reason he's been chosen. There are half a dozen similarly gifted children here in the front half of the Institute. The staff perform cruel experiments on the children for reasons that become horrifyingly clear as the book moves on.
When a new child joins with extraordinary telepathic powers, the scene is set for a situation the management of the Institute had never predicted.
When Tim's and Luke's paths cross, the shit really hits the fan. The last 200 pages of this are amongst the most action packed sequences I think King has ever written.
I'm not one of these people who thinks King has never written a bad book, but his hit rate is incredibly high. I think this is easily another hit. Tim and his fellow captives in the Institute are some of his most sympathetic and mistreated protagonists to date. The staff at the institute are more complex than just bad guys doing bad things. They genuinely believe they're doing good for the world and if they can get their sadistic tendencies out once in a while, that's just gravy.
The story moves at a cracking pace for King novel. I found it difficult to put this book down in the closing stages. And all in King's traditional, easy reading style.
He really is one of the great storytellers and this is one more example of why
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