by Stephen King
From #1 New York Times bestselling author Stephen King, the most riveting and unforgettable story of kids confronting evil since It. “This is King at his best” (The St. Louis Post-Dispatch).
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 another winner: creepy and touching and horrifyingly believable, all at once” (The Boston Globe).