Stephen King’s ‘The Institute‘ is his latest novel to be released and the author is starting to open up about it. The novel has made a huge splash on release and already has landed a limited television release deal thanks to Spyglass Media Group alongside David E. Kelley and Jack Bender who are responsible for the ongoing adaptation of King’s ‘Mr. Mercedes.’
The new tidbits were shared while being a guest on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”
Not only is ‘The Institute’ a novel which follows children in a horrible situation but King also dedicated the novel to his grandsons. The author has long used children in his novels and shares the specific reason he does this:
“Kids… have a unique view. They are people who are pretty much vulnerable to the adult work, and that’s what I wrote about a little bit in The Institute. I wanted to see kids get up on their hind legs and fight the power.”
While this is a story about children, it also is a tale that has people in power who are abusing it who take these children and keep them incarcerated which could be viewed as a parallel to the conditions that real children are facing while held in U.S. migrant detention centers. Colbert, of course, asked if there were any influences from Trump at play here, likely due to King’s public criticism of the President as well as for Trump being the person to enforce this policy instead of trying to have it reversed. The famous author shared that “I try to keep my politics and my stories separate, but they bleed over because I also have a life. And these have been kind of dark times.”
RELATED: David E. Kelley And Jack Bender Are Adapting More Of Stephen King’s Work With ‘The Institute’
What do you think of Stephen King’s use of children to “fight the power” in ‘The Institute’? Will you be reading King’s latest work or are you waiting for the upcoming television series which is still in the early stages of pre-production? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
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 Stephen King’s gut-wrenchingly dramatic story of good vs. evil in a world where the good guys don’t always win.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter
