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‘The Institute’ Might Be Stephen King’s Scariest Novel Yet

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By Laura Miller

• Sept. 10, 2019

THE INSTITUTE By Stephen King

Stephen King’s protagonists have been hunted by all sorts of malevolent beings, from the demonic clown of “It” to the fiendish cowboy Randall Flagg in “ The Stand .” But as scary as those supernatural bad guys can be, King’s most unsettling antagonists are human-size: the blocked writer sliding into delusions of grandeur and domestic violence, the fan possessed to the point of madness by someone else’s fiction, the bullied teenager made homicidal by the cruelty of her peers. We can see something of ourselves in these characters, and recognize in them our own capacity for evil. King’s latest novel, “The Institute,” belongs to this second category, and is as consummately honed and enthralling as the very best of his work. It has no ghosts, no vampires, no metamorphosing diabolical entities or invaders from other dimensions intent on tormenting innocent children. Innocent children are tormented in “The Institute,” but the people who do it are much like you and me.

The novel opens with Tim Jamieson, an ex-cop (he was forced to resign from the Sarasota, Fla., police department after an episode he describes as a “Rube Goldberg” bungle) wandering north to South Carolina, hitchhiking and working odd jobs until he lands in DuPray, a podunk railway depot town with shuttered storefronts and a rundown motel. He takes a gig as a sort of semi-official night patrolman and finds he rather likes the place. That’s the last we’ll hear from him for quite a while, but these first 40 pages of “The Institute” — low-key and relaxed, an unaffected and genially convincing depiction of a certain uncelebrated walk of life — demonstrate how engaging King’s fiction can be even without an underlying low whine of dread.

[ This book was one of our most anticipated titles of September. See the full list . ]

“The Institute” then turns to Luke Ellis, a Minneapolis 12-year-old with an extraordinary brain. Extraordinary in an ordinary way, that is, except for a very minor telekinetic ability. Luke is brilliant. He reads books “the way free-range cows graze, moving on to wherever the grass is greenest,” devouring the work of William James, the A.A. Big Book and everything Cormac McCarthy has written. But he’s also a kid who watches “SpongeBob SquarePants,” has pals and plays basketball with moderate skill. And occasionally, when he’s really excited, Luke might cause an empty pizza pan to skate off a table without touching it. Just as Luke’s mom and dad are getting used to the idea of moving to Boston so that he can take classes at both M.I.T. and Emerson College, a strike team of mysterious operatives breaks into the Ellis home, drugging and abducting Luke and executing his parents.

Luke wakes up in a room decorated like his bedroom back home, but with a door that opens onto a corridor decorated with posters of romping children emblazoned with mottos like “JUST ANOTHER DAY IN PARADISE” and “I CHOOSE TO BE HAPPY!” This is the Institute, and a paradise it is not. He meets a girl named Kalisha who gives him the lay of the land and introduces him to the other inmates, all kids. The adults who run the Institute subject the children — all of whom have telekinetic abilities — to unexplained experiments ranging from the innocuous to the uncomfortable to the existentially terrifying: injections; flickering lights; blood samples; MRIs; and, worst of all, dunkings to the verge of drowning in a tank of water. If the kids comply, they get tokens good for treats from vending machines that offer snacks, booze and even cigarettes. If they resist, they’re beaten or tased. After a few weeks, most of them will be transferred to the Back Half, a part of the Institute shrouded in rumor. No kid ever comes back from the Back Half.

[ Life is imitating Stephen King’s art, and that scares him. ]

The children imprisoned in the Institute learn to navigate its rules and personalities, try to figure out the purpose of it all, wonder if the authorities’ promises that they’ll eventually be returned to their families with their memories wiped can be trusted. It’s a familiar species of narrative reminiscent of countless rehab memoirs and novels about mental hospitals, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” in particular . Those posters in the hallways with their rictus-grin adages conjure an even more disturbing parallel, one that King will allude to repeatedly in “The Institute”: the slogan “Work Will Set You Free,” mounted over the gates of Auschwitz. The children in the Institute aren’t dumb, but they’re still children. They want to believe they’ll go home again, even though they’re pretty sure they won’t.

How do you maintain your dignity and your humanity in an environment designed to strip you of both? That theme, such an urgent one in literature from the 20th century onward, falls well within King’s usual purview. His heroes are often humble or apparently weak: children, working-class stiffs, abused women, the poor, the disabled and the overlooked — people who must summon the courage to fight back against seemingly impossible odds. “The Institute” follows this pattern, but it has some additional fish to fry. Almost as much of the novel is devoted to the staff of the Institute: Mrs. Sigsby, the fanatical director; the security chief, Trevor Stackhouse; assorted doctors, assistants and janitors; and one cleaning lady who, in secret, becomes the children’s only adult ally. From these passages we learn that the people who work in the Institute tell themselves that whatever they’re doing serves a higher good. “Nothing less than the fate of the world was in their hands,” Mrs. Sigsby thinks, “as it had been in the hands of those who had come before them. Not just the survival of the human race, but the survival of the planet. … No one who fully grasped the Institute’s work could regard it as monstrous.”

How does a human being become someone who can regard the abuse of children as, first, a necessary evil, and then, finally, as a matter of routine? That’s a question with undeniable political relevance at this moment. King has made his contempt for the current president, his administration and his policies abundantly clear on Twitter and in other public statements. “The Institute ,” which takes more than one overt dig at Trump, ruminates on the people who carry out the administration’s policies on the ground, the sort of working folk he usually champions. Looking at the woman charged with shepherding the children to their dreadful appointments, Luke “realized he wasn’t a child at all to her. She had made some crucial separation in her mind. He was a test subject. You made it do what you wanted, and if it didn’t, you administered what the psychologists called negative reinforcement. And when the tests were over? You went down to the break room for coffee and Danish and talked about your own kids (who were real kids) or bitched about politics, sports, whatever.”

Gradually, but not too gradually, the exact details of the Institute’s mission come into focus. The children are viewed by the staff and the shadowy bosses that Mrs. Sigsby reports to as resources rather than as “undesirables,” like the children of migrants and other demonized minorities. But the self-deadening required to see the children that way is linked by the Institute’s sole repentant employee to the desensitization that made her able to work in “black houses” in Afghanistan and Iraq, where “enhanced interrogations” were performed. People like her are resources, too, a means to an end for those in charge. Of all the cosmic menaces that King’s heroes have battled, this slow creep into inhumanity may be the most terrifying yet because it is all too real.

Laura Miller is a books and culture columnist for Slate.

The Institute By Stephen King 561 pp. Scribner. $30.

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The Institute

By stephen king.

Book review, full book summary and synopsis for The Institute by Stephen King, a thriller about a telekinetic kid who is kidnapped by a sinister organization.

Luke Ellis is a child prodigy as well as a boy with mild telekinetic abilities. One night, he's take from his home and finds himself in the hands of The Institute, a sinister and ruthless government organization who has been kidnapping kids for their telekinetic and telepathic abilties. They see the children there as test subjects to be exploited for their abilities.

But Luke has another talent, his intellect, and is determined to survive. Luke must grow up quickly and get help from the other kids as he wages his battle against the evils of the Institution.

(The Full Plot Summary is also available, below)

Full Plot Summary

Tim Jamieson is an ex-cop who impulsively decides to hitchhike to New York, but ends up stopping in DuPray, South Carolina and taking a job as a night knocker (patrolman). Meanwhile, in Minneapolis, Luke is a 12-year-old prodigy as well as a boy with mild telekinetic abilities who is kidnapped.

Luke is taken to a facility called The Institute where many kidnapped kids with telekinetic and telepathic abilities are being held. The facility is divided into two sections. In the Front Half , kids are tested on and tortured to enhance their abilities. In the Back Half , kids are put to work to be used as psychic drones to kill certain targets. The process gives them headaches which eventually destroy their minds, becoming so-called "gorks". Luke makes many friends including Avery , a 10-year-old boy with very strong telepathic powers.

Luke helps Maureen , a housekeeper on the staff, who then helps to him to escape and then kills herself. She also gives him a flash drive with video proof of the atrocities at the Institute. Luke ends up in DuPray, where he meets Tim and shows him the flash drive regarding The Institute. People from the Institute show up to take Luke back. They are subdued, but many are left dead. Luke and Tim then head back to The Institute to save the rest of the kids, and Luke negotiates with the Institute to stall for time.

Back at the Institute, Avery and the other Back Half kids have learned how to collectively use their powers to fight back. They also realize that the gorks help to enhance their powers. However, the Back Half kids are now trapped. They also realize there must be more kids like them around the world and more Institutes around the world that are working together.

As Luke and Tim arrive at the Institute, Avery uses his powers to connect with all the other Institutes and it causes the building to levitate. Avery has to stay to maintain the connection and the other Back Half kids try to escape using their greatly enhanced powers. They find out the Front Half kids have been gassed by the staff. When the building falls back down, it crushes any people remaining in the building. In the end, only a few staff are alive and a handful of kids. Luke, Tim, and a few other Back Half kids are alive, but Avery and many, many others are dead. The survivors leave the staff there and drive off.

Three months later, a man with a lisp (the boss of the people running The Institute), shows up at the farm Luke and Tim and the others are at. He explains that Institute was necessary for the safety of the world. Elsewhere, there are precogs (people with precognitive abilities) who make predictions of the future, and then the Institute kids are used to eliminate the future threats that the precogs identify. Luke tells him this system is flawed since mathematical models suggest that precognition is most accurate in the immediate future, not in the distant future. The further out time-wise you go, the more random it becomes. The man with a lisp disagrees and leaves.

The other kids are slowly returned to whatever family they have left (the Institute murdered their parents), but Luke stays with Tim. The book ends with Luke thinking about what a hero little Avery was.

For more detail, see the full Section-by-Section Summary .

If this summary was useful to you, please consider supporting this site by leaving a tip ( $2 , $3 , or $5 ) or joining the Patreon !

Book Review

Stephen King has released a new novel, this time focusing on a sinister organization called The Institute and the abduction of a young boy with telekinetic abilities.

I was never particularly curious about Stephen King until I watched the Castle Rock adaptation. After that, I read the Outsider , which I thought was just okay, but I still wanted to give a different book of his a shot. The Stranger Things -esque vibe of The Institute appealed to me, so I picked this up since I had an Audible credit I needed to use up anyway (my review of the audiobook is below too).

(As a sidenote, I also recently watched Netflix’s In the Tall Grass , based off of a Stephen King and Joe Hill (his son) novella. I thought it was an interesting mind-bendy kind of movie.)

The Institute is more of a thriller than a horror novel, I think, but it’s a fun thriller that also delves into the themes of how power can be abused and the dangers of dehumanizing people. With the United States currently holding kids in cages in the name of deterrence, this book’s premise is clearly not as far fetched as it initially sounds.

In terms of the plot overlaps with Stranger Things , they both have kids with telekinetic powers who are being used as test subjects by an evil organization. So, there’s definitely some plot similarities, but they also diverge pretty significantly as well so you can easily enjoy both.

In the Institute, Stephen King showcases his ability to dream up intriguing premises and write convincing characters that encompass a broad range of ages and backgrounds. It’s a varied and colorful cast that helps to enhance the realism of his fantastical premises.

The Institute Audiobook Review

The audiobook recording for The Institute is fantastic, by the way. The narrator’s voice is easy to listen to and the voices he uses are different enough to help distinguish voices, but subtle enough so as not to become comical. This guy is really great at doing voice parts even the female ones. I thought it was just perfect. I’d highly recommend it.

If you’ve seen my comments on a lot of other audiobooks, you might know that I’m extremely picky about audiobook narrators, so this is high praise coming from me. Thanks to the stellar narration, I enjoyed this book the whole way through.

Read it or Skip it?

I enjoyed the Institute a lot, though I partially attribute this to the stellar audiobook. It’s a fun thriller that touches upon very timely themes and moral questions that we currently face. While it doesn’t really do a deep dive into the nuances of these issues or anything, it does help to enhance the book’s relevance and realism.

Ultimately, the reason to read this is because it’s a well-paced and solidly written thriller with a great cast of characters. I’d recommend it for King fans (obviously) and fans of thrillers in general.

See The Institute on Amazon .

Book Excerpt

Read the first pages of The Institute

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I picked this up with my recent audible credit too and I was hoping to get to it soon! Great review.

thank you! and hope you enjoy it as much as I did!

Well, this book was already on my TBR, but since you enjoyed the audiobook so much, I’ll give it a try!

really happy to hear that! happy listening!

Not sure I want to read it based off of your stupid comment about the U.S. putting kids in cages. Hopefully your comprehension of the book isn’t as biased as your obvious political views.

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Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

New York Times Bestseller

THE INSTITUTE

by Stephen King ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 10, 2019

King fans won’t be disappointed, though most will likely prefer the scarier likes of The Shining and It.

The master of modern horror returns with a loose-knit parapsychological thriller that touches on territory previously explored in Firestarter and Carrie .

Tim Jamieson is a man emphatically not in a hurry. As King’s ( The Outsider , 2018, etc.) latest opens, he’s bargaining with a flight attendant to sell his seat on an overbooked run from Tampa to New York. His pockets full, he sticks out his thumb and winds up in the backwater South Carolina town of DuPray (should we hear echoes of “pray”? Or “depraved”?). Turns out he’s a decorated cop, good at his job and at reading others (“You ought to go see Doc Roper,” he tells a local. “There are pills that will brighten your attitude”). Shift the scene to Minneapolis, where young Luke Ellis, precociously brilliant, has been kidnapped by a crack extraction team, his parents brutally murdered so that it looks as if he did it. Luke is spirited off to Maine—this is King, so it’s got to be Maine—and a secret shadow-government lab where similarly conscripted paranormally blessed kids, psychokinetic and telepathic, are made to endure the Skinnerian pain-and-reward methods of the evil Mrs. Sigsby. How to bring the stories of Tim and Luke together? King has never minded detours into the unlikely, but for this one, disbelief must be extra-willingly suspended. In the end, their forces joined, the two and their redneck allies battle the sophisticated secret agents of The Institute in a bloodbath of flying bullets and beams of mental energy (“ You’re in the south now , Annie had told these gunned-up interlopers. She had an idea they were about to find out just how true that was"). It’s not King at his best, but he plays on current themes of conspiracy theory, child abuse, the occult, and Deep State malevolence while getting in digs at the current occupant of the White House, to say nothing of shadowy evil masterminds with lisps.

Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-9821-1056-7

Page Count: 576

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019

SUSPENSE | THRILLER | PARANORMAL FICTION | SUSPENSE | SUPERNATURAL THRILLER | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE

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More by Stephen King

BOOK REVIEW

by Stephen King

More About This Book

SEEN & HEARD

by Max Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2020

A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.

Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z (2006).

A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.

Pub Date: June 16, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine

Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020

GENERAL SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | SCIENCE FICTION

More by Max Brooks

by Max Brooks

BOOK TO SCREEN

A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.

Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.

A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice ( The Bone Collection , 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”

Pub Date: March 17, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2

Page Count: 352

Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020

GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | SUSPENSE | THRILLER | DETECTIVES & PRIVATE INVESTIGATORS | SUSPENSE | GENERAL & DOMESTIC THRILLER

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by Kathy Reichs

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Book Review: The Institute by Stephen King

Oct 1, 2019 | Book Reviews , Horror , Thriller | 12 comments

The Institute by Stephen King is the perfect book to mark the beginning of the spooky season, and even though there are no ghosts in his latest release, there are more than a fair share of ghouls that are terrifying enough to haunt your dreams. Fair warning to those considering this as a future read; there are a few torture scenes involving children, they aren’t drawn out or graphic, but if you’re like many people and the idea of kids being treated inhumanely is just too much, you best take a pass on this one. But for those who can’t wait for the latest treatment of IT and other horror stories, and don’t mind a little stretching of the imagination (which is par for the course in King novels of course) this latest won’t disappoint you.

Luke Ellis is a gifted child, incredibly smart, yet still well-rounded and loves his parents and friends. After a few pages of basking in his promising life, his parents are murdered and he is kidnapped by a shadowy government organization that herds above-average children into an institution that takes advantage of their intelligence. Ripped from their homes and dumped into a place that subjects them to medical tests which are sometimes painful and almost always traumatic, these kids slowly begin to develop their intelligence into something more powerful; a type of telekinesis that is weaponized once they have been mentally and physically broken. Far from this depravity, we’re also introduced to Tim Jamieson, a man who makes friends wherever he goes, willing to do just about anything, living a simple life in the tiny town of DuPray South Carolina. It’s unclear how these characters will are connected, but as any seasoned reader knows, their meeting is inevitable.

For anyone who follows King on twitter , you’ll know how political he can be. And signs of this are peppered throughout his narrative, even going so far as people outwardly mocking Donald Trump. And although many readers will appreciate this perspective (myself included), it’s one that will undoubtedly turn off a few others, but when you’re a bestselling author with millions of fans, who cares? It’s your book after all, and if you can’t put your own opinions into the mouths of your own characters, where can you?

The message of this book is decidedly murkier. It goes without saying that hurting children is evil, and the adults that are cruel to their young charges are most definitely depicted as the baddies. However, there is the suggestion that what is happening to them is also for the better of humankind, (this sounds cruel and vague I realize, but once you read the book you’ll understand what I’m talking about). Regardless of the intentions, hurting one group of humans for the betterment of other humans will always be wrong, but I loved the gray area that King forces us into for a fleeting portion of this book.

What I love about the horror genre in general is the desperate search for ‘good in the world’. When you’re immersed in something as scary as this book, the return to your everyday life is a bit of a relief, yet you itch to return to the terror that fills its pages. King does a fine job of helping us sort through the mess, shining a beacon of light onto the people and characters we can trust and place our hope on. So although reading a book that focuses on such horrible circumstances can be disturbing, we relish the moment when good will once again prevail. All is right again, especially when there’s a new Stephen King novel on your nightstand.

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12 comments.

I feel like King does this mesmerizing job of making everything so gray. You think the kid has to survive, or that there will be a “final girl,” or that some kind of resolution will get us back to normal. But the truth is that doesn’t happen much of the time in real life, an King’s not going to hold out on us.

Yes, that’s the perfect way to describe it, he does make everything ‘gray’!!! It’s never an easy, straightforward answer.

I would never have expecyed you to be a Stephen King fan! Sounds too dark for me, but the idea of characters being horrible about Trump is very appealing… 😉

hahah well I don’t read too many of his books (because there are so many!) but I do enjoy getting into them.

This is a very thoughtful review. Stephen King is one of my favorite authors, so I’ll get to this book eventually. It sounds awesome!

Thanks very much for your kind words, I think King fans will be really pleased with this latest 🙂

I said about this before but it seems like a truly terrible idea to traumatize and torture children in order to get them to develop special powers. Seems like that would come back to bite you 🙂

right????? haha

I am definitely NOT going to read this but…the government murdered Luke’s parents is what I’m guessing here. (Also, I just love that Stephen King’s photos are always taken by his wife.)

haha I know! Could you imagine what it would be like to be married to Stephen King? He thinks of the creepiest stuff~

Yes, the government definitely murdered his parents, but that’s not really a spoiler, it happens at the beginning of the book

Seeming interesting! Added to my infinite reading list! 😉

I know the feeling! haha

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The Institute by Stephen King Book Review

As I’ve previously mentioned on the blog, Stephen King is one of the few writers that Jay and I both love. Just recently we each compared our Top Five Stephen King books . In our home, we’re amassing an impressive collection of his books and short stories. So, you can imagine we were both thrilled when his new release, The Institute , showed up at our door! A huge thank you to Scribner Books for sending an advanced copy my way. We decided to buddy read The Institute and share both of our book reviews. It’s a two for one deal today with The Institute book review!

*I earn a small commission if you purchase this book through the links included in this post at no extra cost to you. Thank you for supporting my book blog!

Summary of The Institute:

The Institute is a chilling depiction of how believing in a means to an end can have horrific consequences. One night in suburban Minneapolis, Luke Ellis is kidnapped and his parents are murdered. He’s taken to The Institute, a secret complex that hosts children with telekinetic and telepathic abilities. The kids are subject to inhumane testing and brutal punishment if they refuse to cooperate. As Luke’s friends start to disappear to the Back Half of the building, he realizes he must do whatever it takes to escape before his fate is decided as well. Release Date – September 10, 2019

Rachel’s Book Review of The Institute:

Stephen King is possibly best known for his terrifying novels full of nightmarish creatures, but there’s nothing supernaturally scary in The Institute. The only horrors are the treatment of the children and the suspense of whether Luke will manage successfully escape. King’s writing brings you directly into Luke’s thoughts and feelings, so when he was first struck by one of the caretakers, I felt the shock and disbelief as astutely as if I myself had been slapped. Although it seems impossible in theory that a place such as the Institute could exist, all the logistical details, coverups, and mindsets of the employees feel real. That was the scariest thing about this novel – wondering if something like this could happen.

Another strength of this book is King’s ability to write children. Most of the story is told from Luke’s perspective and King captures a twelve year old’s emotions, thoughts, and reactions like no other. To make this task even more difficult, he adds in Luke’s exceptional intelligence and perfectly balances Luke’s childlike experiences with his brilliant mind. Since the book less than 600 pages, King also keeps the plot moving at a brisk pace, which is not always the case in his other novels. The second half in particular will keep you flipping through the pages to discover the ultimate fate of the kids.

My only minor complaint was the inclusion of a few jabs at President Trump. They felt unnecessary and petty and didn’t contribute anything to the plot. When it happened, it was the only time I felt jarred out of the story and back into real life. I might just be getting tired of seeing political opinions inserted everywhere these days.

Undoubtedly though, this will go down as one of my favorite Stephen King books! It’s essentially an extremely well-written and compelling thriller with a touch of the supernatural. Appealing for Stephen King’s devoted fans as well as those who aren’t usually drawn to his books.

Jason’s Book Review of The Institute:

The first question most people ask about Stephen King’s books is, “Well, is the ending any good?” For The Institute, the short answer is yes. The ending comes together nicely; it makes sense and it feels pretty complete. The very, very end I didn’t care for as much but it didn’t ruin the story for me.

Overall, the book is well rounded. I don’t know if he has a new editor, but whoever it is did a great job making sure this book isn’t too bloated. There are times in his other books where he seems to get stuck in a rut and you just want him to move on. I never really experienced that in this book.

That leads into his pacing. The Institute’s pacing is pretty consistent, which is another issue King has had in previous books. At the same time, this book doesn’t have the same “highs” as his other books but it also doesn’t have the “lows” of other books either. The other huge pro of this book is his ability to write children. This skill is second to none and he proves he’s still got it even 33 years after the release of IT ( probably his best book about kids)

I have two major critiques of the book. One, I thought it was pretty predictable. Around the halfway point I had a pretty good idea of what would happen. Now, that isn’t to say there aren’t twists and turns. There are. Just don’t expect anything too epic.

Second, are his Trump references. In the beginning it’s not bad, just talking about things Trump has done in the news. This is a King staple, referencing politicians, specifically presidents, and what they are doing in the news. However, near the end he took a couple of stabs at Trump and his supporters that added literally nothing to the story, other than just to talk about how he doesn’t like the president. For someone who is as talented at writing as King is, he could have come up with more creative ways to make fun of the president or show his dislike. The way he did it here is just lazy and takes you out of the story. You can tell it’s King talking and not his characters.

Would I recommend this book? Yeah, definitely. I don’t think it’s one of the best books he has ever written, but it’s still very good. If you don’t like his full-blown horror books, it’s great for you. The supernatural occurrences in the book are what’s expected from him. His ability to write children and a turn of phrase is still up there with some of the other King greats. If you have even the slightest interest in this book, just go out and read it.

The Institute Book Review is is my Review of the Month for the review collection on LovelyAudiobooks.info

Do you think you’ll read The Institute?

Sounds like something I need to add to my TBR list.

This book was so crap and so illogical at every turn that I rated it a 2. It contradicted itself in its plot and had no logical basis in anything. It was a total bummer, like most of this author – he gained fame through film productions. And it’s because it’s easy to implement facade ideas. The author has an idea and is almost never able to follow it logically, much less intelligently.

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Book Review: The Institute by Stephen King

The Wulver’s Library ‘s Review of The Institute by Stephen King

Stephen King is a master at casting a familiar shadow over an eerie smalltown setting and The Institute is no different. Hidden in the depths of an American forest, the organisation known only as “The Institute”, sends out forces to kidnap children and kill their families. They continue to subject these children to tests to bring out their developing psychic powers.

King has always been supreme at crafting a story from the ground up and bringing them together in a soft and simple way; however he also brings in a load of political references. There’s even a dig at the Trump administration which seems fitting today, of all days.

We start our story with Tim, an ex-cop, who has quick intelligence and thoughtfulness but has lost his job to a freak occurrence and ends up in the small town of DuPray as a night knocker. This turns out to be a major theme of the story: events of pure chance (or is it destiny). Our story takes place largely in the Institute itself and from the perspective of 12yo child prodigy, Luke Ellis.

Luke is on his way to attending two universities at once and learns that in order to keep from the terrifying abyss inside of him he hungers to learn more. Soon he is snatched by the Institute and we delve into the deep fears of the Institute: waking up in a place exactly like his home for it to be somewhere otherworldly and rendered. Here, he finds several other children like him in the same predicament who are told that they are heroes helping to save the world; but they are tortured until they are empty vessels.

The Institute isn’t an overly violent book, as King sometimes tends to be. In many ways, it relies on the idea that children can be connected to a powerful force that brings sinister scenes that follow a certain regime. We do explore the bad side of adults put into a position of power with child abuse, cremation rooms and water tanks but Luke makes comparison between the staff who imagine they are doing the right thing and those who go along with a sinister regime.

Everything that you would expect from King is here: the eccentric characters, the sturdy plot, the bonkers imagination that gave us all the previous work. It isn’t his best work but it still hums and crackles with unease.

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Book Review: The Institute by Stephen King

From #1 New York Times bestselling author Stephen King, the most riveting and unforgettable story of kids confronting evil since It—publishing just as the second part of It, the movie, lands in theaters. 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.

When it comes to crafting stories about kids in creepy peril, Stephen King is… well… king.

The Institute doesn’t start the way you think it will — no mention of main character Luke or the Institute itself for about 50 pages. Instead, we meet Tim Jamieson, an ex-cop from Florida who sets out hitchhiking without a whole lot of purpose and winds up in a small town in South Carolina, where he joins the local sheriff’s department as a night knocker, sort of an unarmed watchman position. Eventually, Tim feels like he’s possibly, finally found a home and a new meaning for his life in this little town.

And that’s the last we see of Tim for a few hundred pages.

The main focus of the story is introduced when we meet Luke, a brilliant 12-year-old about to start MIT, whose incredible mental abilities come with a side of very mild telekinetic power. It’s his telekinetics, rather than his brain power, that make him a target for the Institute and land him in this isolated facility in Maine. The children at the Institute are put through a barrage of shots and sinister tests, all designed to enhance their TP (telepathy) and (TK) telekinesis. During their free time, the kids can hang out, basically keep whatever hours they choose, and do whatever they want, including drinking and smoking. In fact, drinking and smoking are encouraged, since the kids earn vending machine tokens through good behavior, and an addiction is a marvelous motivation to keep earning those tokens.

The purpose of the Institute is slowly revealed, but long before we learn why they’re doing what they’re doing, we know enough to know it’s bad. The treatment of the kids is horrific. They’re subjected to physical and emotional torture and abuse, and there’s very little concern about whether the kids are actually healthy, so long as their TP and TK abilities are honed and developed.

I’m not going to go too far into plot here — as with most Stephen King books, it’s best to just read it and put the pieces together as you go along.

So is The Institute a must-read? Well, for King fans, absolutely. It’s not skin-crawling horror like his recent book The Outsider , but it is still chilling and disturbing and creepy. That said, the book is a bit long, and takes a while to really get going. It took me two false starts before I really got into it, hitting stumbling blocks with the sudden transition from a story about an adult in South Carolina to the main story about the kidnapped children. Ultimately, it comes together and the story really works, but I think there are places where the action could have moved forward a little more quickly.

If you enjoy King’s writing, you’ll enjoy The Institute . As for me, as I always love when Stephen King references himself (and with over 60 novels in print, he has a lot of source material to choose from!). Here’s one example from The Institute that made me happy:

Back in the main corridor — what Luke now understood to be the residents’ wing — the little girls, Gerda and Greta, were standing and watching with wide, frightened eyes. They were holding hands and clutching dolls as identical as they were. They reminded Luke of twins in some old horror movie.

Good stuff.

_________________________________________

The details:

Title: The Institute Author: Stephen King Publisher: Scribner Publication date: September 10, 2019 Length: 561 pages Genre: Horror Source: Purchased

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18 thoughts on “ book review: the institute by stephen king ”.

Hi Lisa, I feel like I should read a Stephen King book, just to know what they’re like. I’ve seen The Shining which scared me silly. Which book would you recommend?

Oh gosh, they’re all so different. I might start with 11/22/63 — it’s more speculative fiction than straight horror, so that might be a good one to try and see if you like his writing.

Thanks, Lisa. I feel like I may have asked you that once before 😉 I must be getting old!

Ha ha, if so, then at least we have each other for company! 🙂

thank you for this review!

Do you plan to read the book? Dying to hear what other people think!

I am not sure. I have to be honest, I have never read a Stephen King book because they are too scary and/or intense, but I appreciate how he is loved by so many people.

He is pretty awesome. But I get that a lot of people find his work too scary or hard to take.

thank you for understanding! 🙂

I love Stephen King, but most of his books are way too long! I’ll get to this one eventually. I’m glad you mostly liked it.

Overall, I’m glad I read it!

Fabulous review!!! I don’t like reading horror so won’t be reading this but I enjoyed reading your thoughts :))))

I love those little easter eggs too! I’ve got a hold on this at my library and will be able to read it in approximately 6 months apparently. lol

Well… plenty of time to savor the anticipation, I guess!

Great review. I liked this book too despite taking a while to get into. It was quite emotional near the end, the bond the characters made under adversity and the sacrifices made for each other. I’ve read all his short story collections but this was actually the first full novel of his I’ve read. The Trump digs were a bit petty, but I guess permissable given the book is such a page turner.

I love Stephen King book. Love it

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The Institute by Stephen King review – return to DuPray

Cosmic forces move beneath the surface in the latest Stephen King novel – but it’s a replay of his greatest hits

W hen each new Stephen King novel starts to read like the literary equivalent of a greatest hits album, I can’t help wondering if we are seeing the fulfilment of a prophecy King’s detractors have been touting for years: that he is in the declining arc of his career, and that the future for fans contains no new masterpieces, only bonus tracks.

The Institute does not begin as it means to go on. Tim Jamieson is a disgraced cop en route to New York on the promise of work as a security guard. Running mainly on intuition – “great events turn on small hinges” – Tim surrenders his seat on the plane to a government official and begins hitching his way north instead, ending up in a nowhere town that exists mainly to serve its associated rail depot. Here he gets a job making night patrols and begins to gain the trust of the local sheriff.

The town of DuPray will be familiar territory for King’s Constant Readers, as he calls us: a neighbourly place, small enough for everyone to know everyone’s business yet large enough for sinister interlopers to hide between the cracks. This is a setting King excels at creating – think Needful Things , think Bag of Bones even – and most readers will settle down for the ride, waiting for whatever curveball he is gearing up to throw them. What they will not be expecting is for Jamieson to vanish. There are almost 300 pages to wait before he is seen again, when DuPray – the town’s name is no accident – becomes the backdrop for the denouement of another story entirely.

The bulk of the novel’s action takes place in the titular Institute, a top-secret facility run by shady operatives whose task is to protect humanity’s future by predicting vectors of conflict before they materialise. So far, so Philip K Dick. In a somewhat predictable twist, the Institute is using children to dispatch its targets: underage conscripts hand-picked from birth for their psychic powers and forced to become part of a process that leads inexorably to the decay and eventual death of their human selves.

King is more than a little enamoured of the “special child” trope. The young hero of The Institute , Luke Ellis, is the latest in a long line ranging from Carrie White in King’s 1974 debut through Danny Torrance in The Shining and Charlie McGee in Firestarter all the way to Duddits in the once-read-best-forgotten Dreamcatcher from 2001. Closest cousins to Luke are Seth Garin and David Carver from King’s 1996 “mirror novels”, The Regulators and Desperation respectively. Seth is autistic and telepathic; David believes he has raised a friend from the dead through the power of prayer. Luke embodies both powers.

Like a substantial tranche of horror fiction, much of King’s output is concerned with the battle between good and evil. Where he departs from the template most substantially is in his repeating expositions on the nature of faith – not in God or a god necessarily, but in the imaginative and spiritual power of the god-shaped hole. When the Institute’s evil director insists that its work must continue no matter the cost in individual lives, Jamieson counters that peace and freedom bought with the suffering of innocent children is no freedom at all. Dostoevsky King is not, but he clearly has no scruples about repurposing Ivan’s seminal argument with Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov . As TS Eliot said, good writers borrow, great writers steal, and King is big enough and bold enough to steal from the best.

It has often been argued that his paramount talent as a writer is for storytelling. Such a claim is borne out by his wider cultural influence, the Netflix series Stranger Things being just one recent example. What is mentioned less often is the engine of his storytelling, the compelling and tactile quality of the writing itself. His immaculate sense of place, his flawless ear for dialogue, that intangible literary quality we refer to as voice – these are the reasons we return to King, and in King it is the voice that persists, even when the stories themselves are so much bunkum.

How far The Institute will satisfy you as a reader will depend on what draws you to King’s fiction in the first place. If you enjoy boss battles and grandiose conspiracies, the allure of cosmic forces moving beneath the surface of sleepy reality, then this novel may be for you. If, like me, what you enjoy most in King is his obsession with minor detail and irrelevant backstory, his gift for portraying the lives of ordinary people, his sly asides to the reader and loving literary references, you are likely to find this book – in spite of its 500 pages – too cursory, too interested in the wrong things. The Institute is already being billed as IT for the Trump age, but speaking as one who prefers those works often thought of as misfires ( Hearts in Atlantis , From a Buick 8 , even – yes – The Tommyknockers ) it feels too writing-by-numbers for that, insufficiently distinctive. Extreme facility with words can be the writer’s enemy. One is never in doubt that King could write about anything. It is just a shame he writes so much of it, and – too frequently these days – to such small ends.

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Review: Stephen King returns with ‘The Institute’

It's good kids pitted against evil adults inside Stephen King's new book, "The Institute."

The Institute

By Stephen King

Scribner. 576 pp. $30

Reviewed by Rob Merrill

The kids are all right again in Stephen King’s world.

Not since Part One of It or his short story “The Body,” which became the film Stand by Me , has King based a story almost entirely around the lives and fears of young people.

The protagonist of T he Institute is a hyper-intelligent 12-year-old named Luke Ellis. “Your basic good boy, doing what he was told,” King writes, “the guy who went out of his way to be social so people wouldn’t think he was a weirdo as well as a brainiac.” Snatched from his Minneapolis bed one night, Luke wakes up in a replica of his room with a few details missing. One of the giveaways? His collectible “Wings for Willkie” 1940 presidential button is missing from inside the cup of his Little League trophy.

Just pages later, Luke is face-to-face with the villains of King’s story, a buttoned-up Mrs. Sigsby (we later learn her first name is Julia and she’s the chief administrator of the Institute) “wearing a tailored DVF business suit that did not disguise her beyond-lean build,” and Dr. Hendricks, “with his protruding front teeth and extreme height,” earning him the nickname “Donkey Kong.”

To say any more about what the Institute is or what happens to the gifted children imprisoned there would spoil the story, but it’s classic King. The best scenes in the first half of the book are when the kids are talking with one another, trying to figure out where they are, why they’re there, and eventually what to do about it.

"Have we been kidnapped?" Luke asks his new friends.

"Well, duh," replies George.

"Because every now and then I walk into a room and the door closes behind me?"

"Well, if they were grabbing people for their good looks, Iris and Sha wouldn't be here," says George, as Kalisha chimes in with, "Dinkleballs."

The second half of the book hinges on the kindness of a couple of adults as Luke begins to figure out what’s happening to him and his friends. King fleshes out the supporting characters nicely and there’s a “Rocky vs. Drago” feel to it as you really begin to root for the kids and their sympathetic grown-ups.

Anyone who avoids King because they don't like "horror" novels will be safe reading this one. It's more mystery than horror, with the evil concentrated on inhumanity. There's no bloody gore or supernatural forces, just adults treating children horribly. As the book climaxes and then reaches its resolution, you'll have to decide for yourself if the good or the bad guys win.

Merrill wrote this review for the Associated Press.

The Institute – Stephen King

Published by Mel on May 8, 2021 May 8, 2021

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.

My Review of The Institute

It has been a LOOOONG time since I read anything by Stephen King, one of the go-to authors of my teenage years. The last thing I read was 11/22/63 and that was a good few years ago. I am going to have to go through all of his books from the last decade. This one was great!

There is a facility in the middle of nowhere. The Institute. In it, there are a group of children. Stolen from their families because of their special abilities, they are cruelly forced into obeying the caretakers or the consequences are dire. No-one has ever escaped the institute. Until now.

Well, can I just say this narrator was EXCELLENT! What an awesome job he did! Every single character had their own unique voice, tone, PITCH even! He did SUCH A GOOD JOB with the female characters. One of my absolute pet peeves with audiobooks is narrators who can’t do different characters but this one blew it out of the water! With the older characters, for instance, younger characters, male AND female! Each one was so different! One of the best narrators I have listened to! Probably still not as great as Ray Porter – but still amazing!

It had King’s typical slightly long-winded scene-setting, which did get a bit slow at times. But the character development is superb. The storyline is absolutely captivating and I had a lot of trouble turning it off and going to sleep!

He did a lot better than other authors I have read focusing on children. I’ve read a few books lately with children in them and I rolled my eyes at how awfully they are portrayed. But in this one it wasn’t so bad. I mean Luke is supposed to be a genius and comes across a little annoying at times and I am not sure if that is how a kid, even a super smart one, would react to different circumstances.

One thing I really enjoyed about this book was the way the characters were made to develop their powers. At times I really felt for these kids and their circumstances. I really wanted to punch the caretakers. King does such a good job getting you to invest in the characters and slowly getting you into the grip of the storyline.

I didn’t even mind the ending which has divided quite a few people! Above all, a solid listen for me! I devoured it. I didn’t LOVE it. It didn’t move me enough for a 5-star rating. But, it is a solid 4.

I purchased The Institute at my own expense on audible.

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Hi my name is Mel. I'm from Sydney, Australia and I am a nurse and a mother of two. This blog is a collaboration of my thoughts about books! I couldn't keep track of the books i've read, so I started to review each one I read. I hope you enjoy and find a book you want to read! Let me know how you go! *I am a Book Depository affiliate and may earn a small commission if you purchase through these links. All others are non-affiliate links.

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Stephen King’s The Institute, review: Crackles with delicious unease

King’s new book might remind you of netflix’s ‘stranger things’, but he has been writing about psychic children and conspiracies since the sixties  , article bookmarked.

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There’s no question about it: Stephen King is a past master at casting an eerie shade on familiar fictional materials. His new book, The Institute , concerns a sinister government facility, operational since the Second World War. Hidden in the depths of the American forest, the organisation known as “the Institute” sends out special forces to kidnap children (having first dispatched their families), and subjects them to all kinds of horrific tests in order to bring out their developing psychic powers.

If you are now thinking of the recent Netflix show Stranger Things , don’t forget that King got there first: he’s been writing about psychic children and conspiracies since the Sixties. There’s even a sense here that he’s having fun. Among the youngsters in the Institute are a pair of girl twins, which are reminiscent of the characters of “some old horror movie”.

King is supreme at crafting the building blocks of a story and laying them together in a slick, teasing and apparently simple way. But there is also a wealth of political references: libraries not getting enough cash; the military-industrial complex and some of its dodgier moments such as waterboarding; as well as the Trump administration (at which there are many digs, some sly, some less so).

We begin with Tim, an all-American hero loner ex-cop – a type, to be sure, but given depth, thoughtfulness and a quick intelligence that sets him apart. He’s lost his job thanks to a freak occurrence, which turns out to be one of the major themes: is an event the result of pure chance, or is it somehow destined? The bulk of the story, however, takes place in the dirty, grey, sinister Institute itself, and from the perspective of 12-year-old Luke Ellis.

40 books to read while self-isolating

Supremely bright, Luke was on his way to matriculating at two universities at once. He learns, and needs to learn, in order to keep his distance from a terrifying abyss he can sense inside him. This is one of the many destabilising images that King sneaks in, catching you off-guard. If there is a fault here, it’s that this dizzying sense of encroaching chaos isn’t fully explored.

Soon Luke is snatched away by the goons of the Institute. King preys on deep fears: Luke wakes up in a place that’s been decked out exactly like his bedroom at home, only without a window. That is a powerful childhood terror: to wake up somewhere familiar, and for it to be somewhere utterly other, the domestic rendered alien. Here, Luke finds several children in the same predicament. They are told they are heroes, helping to save the world; but they are tortured until they burn out.

The Institute isn’t overly violent or shlocky, as some of King’s books can tend to be. In many ways, especially with Luke as its protagonist, it could almost be young adult fiction, particularly as it relies on the idea that children, when connected, are a powerful insurrectionary force. Nevertheless, there are deeply sinister scenes, such as one in the incinerating room, made even more creepy by the fact that a staff member likes to meditate there. Auschwitz is mentioned, and Luke makes comparisons between the staff, who blindly imagine they are doing the right thing, and those who went along with the Nazi regime.

Everything you would expect from King is here: eccentric background characters (the tramp who believes in government conspiracies, the 70-year-old secretary who’s also handy with a gun, the doctor who’s slowly going crazy thanks to over-exposure to telepaths); a sturdy, controlled plot; and a sense of the kind of bonkers, slant-wise imagination that gave us It and Pet Sematary . While not his best, The Institute still hums and crackles with delicious unease.

Stephen King’s ‘The Institute’ is published by Hodder & Stoughton on 10 September, £10; Philip Womack’s latest novel, ‘The Arrow of Apollo’, will be published in May 2020

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Interview highlights

Stephen king's new story took him 45 years to write.

Mary Louise Kelly

Courtney Dorning

Stephen King says finishing one of his stories decades after he started it felt like "calling into a canyon of time." Francois Mori/AP hide caption

Stephen King says finishing one of his stories decades after he started it felt like "calling into a canyon of time."

Stephen King is out with a new collection of short stories.

As you might expect from the reigning King of Horror, some are terrifying. Some are creepy. Others are laugh-out-loud funny. And one of them took him 45 years to write.

The book is a collection of 12 stories, called You Like it Darker .

Stephen King's legacy of horror

Over the course of his decades-long career as a writer, King has learned there's no taking a story too far.

"I found out – to sort of my delight and sort of my horror – that you can't really gross out the American public," King told NPR.

He spoke with All Things Considered host Mary Louise Kelly about the book, destiny and getting older.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Mary Louise Kelly: I want to start by asking you about the story, The Answer Man . You began it when you were 30. You finished it when you were 75. What the heck happened?

Stephen King: Well, I lost it. What happens with me is I will write stories and they don't always get done. And the ones that don't get done go in a drawer and I forget all about them. And about five years ago, these people started to collect all the stuff that was finished and all this stuff that was unfinished and put it in an archive. They were going through everything – desk drawers, wastebaskets underneath the desk, every place. I'm not exactly a very organized person. My nephew John Leonard found this particular story, which was written in the U.N. Plaza Hotel back in the '70s, I think. And he said, "You know, this is pretty good. You really ought to finish this." And I read it and I said, "You know, I think I know how to finish it now." So I did.

Kelly: Well give people a taste. The first six or so pages that you had written back in the hotel, it becomes a 50-page story. What was it that you decided was worth returning to?

King: Well, I like the concept: This young man is driving along, and he's trying to figure out whether or not he should join his parents' white shoe law firm in Boston, or whether he should strike out on his own. And he finds this man on the road who calls himself the Answer Man. And he says, "I will answer three of your questions for $25, and you have 5 minutes to ask these questions." So I thought to myself, I'm going to write this story in three acts. One while the questioner is young, and one when he's middle aged, and one when he's old. The question that I ask myself is: "Do you want to know what happens in the future or not?"

Kelly: This story, like many of your stories, is about destiny – whether some things are meant to happen no matter what we do, no matter what choices we make. Do you believe that's true?

King: The answer is I don't know. When I write stories, I write to find out what I really think. And I don't think there's any real answer to that question.

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'carrie' turns 50 here are the best stephen king novels — chosen by you.

Kelly: You do describe in the afterword of the book that going back in your seventies to complete a story you had begun as a young man gave you, and I'll quote your words, "The oddest sense of calling into a canyon of time." Can you explain what that means?

King: Well, you listen for the echo to come back. When I was a young man, I had a young man's ideas about The Answer Man . But now, as a man who has reached, let us say, a certain age, I'm forced to write from experience and just an idea of what it might be like to be an old man. So yeah, it felt to me like yelling and then waiting for the echo to come back all these years later.

Kelly: Are there subjects you shy away from, where you think about it and think, "You know what, that might be one step too creepy, too weird?"

King: I had one novel called Pet Cemetery that I wrote and put in a drawer because I thought, "Nobody will want to read this. This is just too awful." I wanted to write it to see what would happen, but I didn't think I would publish it. And I got into a contractual bind, and I needed to do a book with my old company. And so I did. And I found out – sort of to my delight and sort of to my horror – that you can't really gross out the American public. You can't go too far.

Kelly: It was a huge bestseller, as I recall.

King: Yeah, it's a bestseller and it was a movie. And yeah, the same thing is true with It , about the killer clown who preys on children

Kelly: Who still haunts my nightmares, I have to tell you. You've written how many books at this point?

King: I don't know.

King: Really? In our recent coverage of you, we've said everything from 50 to 70.

King: I think it's probably around 70, but I don't keep any count. I remember thinking as a kid that it would be a really fine lifetime to be able to write 100 novels.

Kelly: Oh my gosh. Well you sound like you're still having a lot of fun, so I hope you have quite a few more novels for us to come.

King: That'd be good.

• Stephen King
• Short stories

Review: Stephen King knows 'You Like It Darker' and obliges with sensational new tales

After 50 years, Stephen King knows his Constant Readers all too well. In fact, it’s right there in the title of the legendary master of horror’s latest collection of stories: “ You Like It Darker .” 

Heck yeah, Uncle Stevie, we do like it darker. Obviously so does King, who’s crafted an iconic career of keeping folks up at night either turning pages and/or trying to hide from their own creeped-out imagination. The 12 tales of “Darker” (Scribner, 512 pp., ★★★½ out of four) are an assortment of tried-and-true King staples, with stories that revisit the author’s old haunts – one being a clever continuation of an old novel – and a mix of genres from survival frights to crime drama (a favorite of King’s in recent years). It’s like a big bag of Skittles: Each one goes down different but they’re all pretty tasty.

And thoughtful as well. King writes in “You Like It Darker” – a play on a Leonard Cohen song – that with the supernatural and paranormal yarns he spins, “I have tried especially hard to show the real world as it is." With the opener “Two Talented Bastids,” King takes on an intriguing, grounded tale of celebrity: A son of a famous writer finally digs into the real reason behind how his father and his dad’s best friend suddenly went from landfill owners to renowned artists overnight.

That story’s bookended by “The Answer Man,” which weaves together Americana and the otherwordly. Over the course of several decades, a lawyer finds himself at major turning points, and the same strange guy shows up to answer his big questions (needing payment, of course), in a surprisingly emotional telling full of small-town retro charm and palpable dread.

With some stories, King mines sinister aspects in life’s more mundane corners. “The Fifth Step” centers on a sanitation engineer has a random and fateful meeting on a park bench with an addict working his way through sobriety, with one heck of a slowburn reveal. A family dinner is the seemingly quaint setting for twisty “Willie the Weirdo,” about a 10-year-old misfit who only confides in his dying grandpa. And in the playfully quirky mistaken-identity piece “Finn,” a truly unlucky teenager is simply walking home alone when wrong place and wrong time lead to a harrowing journey.

Check out: USA TODAY's weekly Best-selling Booklist

A couple entries lean more sci-fi: “Red Screen” features a cop investigating a wife’s murder, with her husband claiming she was possessed; while in “The Turbulence Expert,” a man named Craig Dixon gets called into work, his office is an airplane and his job is far from easy. There’s also some good old-fashioned cosmic terror with “The Dreamers,” starring a Vietnam vet and his scientist boss' experiments that go terrifyingly awry. The 76-year-old King notably offers up some spry elderly heroes, too. One finds himself in harm’s way during a family road trip in “On Slide Inn Road,” where a signed Ted Williams bat takes center stage, and “Laurie” chronicles an aging widower and his new canine companion running afoul of a ticked-off alligator.

'Carrie' turns 50: Ranking iconic author Stephen King's best books turned films

King epics like “It” and “The Stand” are so huge the books double as doorstops, yet the author has a long history of exceptional short fiction, including the likes of “The Body,” “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption” and “The Life of Chuck” (from the stellar 2020 collection “If It Bleeds” ). And with “Darker,” it’s actually the two lengthier entries that are the greatest hits.

“Rattlesnakes” is a sequel of sorts to King’s 1981 novel "Cujo," where reptiles are more central to what happens than an unhinged dog. Decades after his son’s death and a divorce results from an incident involving a rabid Saint Bernard, Vic Trenton is retired and living at a friend’s mansion in the Florida Keys when a meeting with a neighbor leads to unwanted visits from youthful specters. It both brings a little healing catharsis to a traumatizing read ("Cujo" definitely sticks with you) and opens up a new wound with unnerving bite.

Then there’s the 152-page “Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream,” which leans more into King’s recent noir detective/procedural era. School janitor Danny gets a psychic vision of a girl who’s been murdered and he tries to do the right thing by informing the police. But that’s when the nightmare really begins, as he becomes a prime suspect and has his life torn asunder by the most obsessed cop this side of Javert. Danny’s all too ready to be his Valjean, a compelling sturdy personality who fights back hard – and the best King character since fan-favorite private eye Holly Gibney .

“Horror stories are best appreciated by those who are compassionate and empathetic,” King writes in his afterword. And with “You Like It Darker,” he proves once more that his smaller-sized tales pack as powerful a wallop as the big boys.

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You Like It Darker Hardcover – May 21, 2024

• Print length 484 pages
• Language English
• Publisher HACHETTE
• Publication date May 21, 2024
• Dimensions 6.46 x 1.89 x 9.37 inches
• ISBN-10 1399725092
• ISBN-13 978-1399725095
• See all details

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Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ HACHETTE (May 21, 2024)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 484 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1399725092
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1399725095
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.46 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.46 x 1.89 x 9.37 inches
• Best Sellers Rank: #278,973 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books )

About the author

Stephen king.

Stephen King is the author of more than fifty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers. His first crime thriller featuring Bill Hodges, MR MERCEDES, won the Edgar Award for best novel and was shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger Award. Both MR MERCEDES and END OF WATCH received the Goodreads Choice Award for the Best Mystery and Thriller of 2014 and 2016 respectively.

King co-wrote the bestselling novel Sleeping Beauties with his son Owen King, and many of King's books have been turned into celebrated films and television series including The Shawshank Redemption, Gerald's Game and It.

King was the recipient of America's prestigious 2014 National Medal of Arts and the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for distinguished contribution to American Letters. In 2007 he also won the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America. He lives with his wife Tabitha King in Maine.

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Book Review: 'Cujo' character returns as one of 12 stories in Stephen King’s ‘You Like It Darker'

I n Stephen King’s world, “It” is a loaded word. It’s hard not to picture Pennywise the Clown haunting the sewers of Derry, Maine, of course, but in the horror writer’s newest collection of stories, “You Like It Darker,” “It” ranges from a suspicious stranger on a park bench, to an extraterrestrial being bestowing a gift that helps best friends realize their potential, to telepaths whose sole job is to keep airplanes from falling out of the sky.

Twelve stories makes up the book, with one of the longest (90 pages), “Rattlesnakes,” reintroducing readers to Vic Trenton, who King fans will remember as the father of Tad, the boy killed by the rabid St. Bernard Cujo in King’s 1981 novel of that name. Now 72, Trenton is riding out the pandemic at a friend’s waterfront property in the Florida Keys, where he meets a widow who also lost loved ones in a terrible accident. It’s fairly creepy, featuring long-dead twins trying to haunt their way back to life, but it’s hardly the darkest here.

I’d give that honor to “The Fifth Step,” which in just 10 pages should scare anyone who’s been paying attention to the true crime stories splashed across the screens of this country’s tawdrier news sources. But is it “darker,” really than any of the more than 60 books King has written in his illustrious career? Probably not, but perhaps the afterword quote from the author, also featured on the back of the hardcover — “You like it darker? Fine. So do I.” — helps sell books in today’s extreme world, even for a perennial bestseller like Mr. King.

The best of these stories, as is true with the best of King’s work, feature horror tempered with heart. I really enjoyed “On Slide Inn Road,” featuring a grandfather who’s still pretty accurate with a baseball bat, and “The Answer Man,” which poses the question, “If you could know anything about the future, what would it be?”

I’d like to know how much longer we’ll have to enjoy this uniquely American icon, who at the age of 76 continues to write and publish at a furious pace. This collection’s afterword reads like a recording from King’s therapist’s couch, or a confessional on a reality TV series. He admits “the only two times I ever came close to getting it all were in two prison stories: ‘The Green Mile’ and ‘Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption.’” Here’s hoping he keeps trying, because like millions of others around the world, I’ll read every word.

AP book reviews: https://apnews.com/hub/book-reviews

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Read an Excerpt from Stephen King’s You Like It Darker

When a famous writer dies at ninety, his son investigates the defining friendship of his life. Turns out the old man kept his friends close—and his secrets closer.

My father—my famous father—died in 2023, at the age of ninety. Two years before he passed, he got an email from a freelance writer named Ruth Crawford asking him for an interview. I read it to him, as I did all his personal and business correspondence, because by then he’d given up his electronic devices—first his desktop computer, then his laptop, and finally his beloved phone. His eyesight stayed good right up to the end, but he said that looking at the iPhone’s screen gave him a headache. At the reception following the funeral, Doc Goodwin told me that Pop might have suffered a series of mini-strokes leading up to the big one.

Around the time he gave up his phone—this would have been five or six years before he died—I took early retirement from my position as Castle County School Superintendent, and went to work for Dad full-time. There was plenty to do. He had a housekeeper, but those duties fell to me at night and on the weekends. I helped him dress in the morning and undress at night. I did most of the cooking, and cleaned up the occasional mess when Pop couldn’t make it to the bathroom in the middle of the night.

He had a handyman as well, but by then Jimmy Griggs was pushing eighty himself, and so I found myself doing the chores Jimmy didn’t get around to—everything from mulching Pop’s treasured flowerbeds to plunging out the drains when they got clogged. Assisted living was never discussed, although God knows Pop could have afforded it; a dozen mega-best-selling novels over forty years had left him very well off.

The last of his “engaging doorstoppers” (Donna Tartt, New York Times ) was published when Pop was eighty-two. He did the obligatory round of interviews, sat for the obligatory photos, and then announced his retirement. To the press, he did so graciously, with his “trademark humor.” (Ron Charles, Washington Post ) To me he said, “Thank God the bullshit’s finished.” With the exception of the informal picket-fence interview he gave Ruth Crawford, he never spoke for the record again. He was asked many times and always refused; claimed he’d said all he had to say, including some things he probably should have kept to himself.

“You give enough interviews,” he told me once, “and you are bound to stick your foot in your mouth a time or two. Those are the quotes that last, and the older you are, the more likely it becomes.”

Yet his books continued to sell, so his business affairs continued. I went over the contract renewals, cover concepts, and the occasional movie or TV option with him, and I dutifully read every interview proposal once he was incapable of reading them himself. He always said no, and that included Ruth Crawford’s proposal.

“Give her the standard response, Mark—flattered to be asked, but no thanks.” He hesitated, though, because this one was a little different.

Crawford wanted to write a piece about my father and his longtime friend, David “Butch” LaVerdiere, who died in 2019. Pop and I went to his funeral on the West Coast in a chartered Gulfstream. Pop was always close with his money—not stingy, but close—and the whopping expense of that round trip said a lot about his feeling for the man I grew up calling Uncle Butch. That feeling held strong, although the two men hadn’t seen each other face-to-face in ten years or more.

Pop was asked to speak at the funeral. I didn’t think he would—his rejection of the public spotlight spread in all directions, not just interviews—but he did it. He didn’t go to the podium, only stood up where he was with the help of his cane. He was always a good speaker, and that didn’t change with age.

“Butch and I were kids going to a one-room schoolhouse before the Second World War. We grew up in a no-stoplight dirt-road town fixing cars, patching them up with Bondo, playing sports and then coaching them. As men we took part in town politics and maintained the town dump—very similar jobs, now that I think about it. We hunted, we fished, we put out grassfires in the summer and plowed the town roads in the winter. Knocked over a right smart of mailboxes doing it, too. I knew him when no one knew his name—or mine—outside of a twenty-mile radius. I should have come to see him these last years, but I was busy with my own affairs. I thought to myself, there’s time. We always think that, I guess. Then time runs out. Butch was a fine artist, but he was also a good man. I think that’s more important. Maybe some here don’t and that’s all right, that’s all right. Thing is, I always had his back and he always had mine.”

He paused, head down, thinking.

“In my little Maine town there’s a saying for friends like that. We kep’ close.”

Yes they did, and that included their secrets.

Ruth Crawford had a solid clip file—I checked. She had published articles, mostly personality profiles, in a dozen places, many local or regional ( Yankee , Downeast , New England Life ), but a few national, including a piece on the benighted town of Derry in The New Yorker . When it came to Laird Carmody and Dave LaVerdiere, I thought she had a good hook to hang her proposed piece on. Her thesis had come up glancingly in pieces either about Pop or Uncle Butch, but she wanted to drill down on it: two men from the same small town in Maine who had become famous in two different fields of cultural endeavor. Not only that, either; both Carmody and LaVerdiere had achieved fame in their mid-forties, at a time when most men and women have given over the ambitions of their youth. Who have, as Pop once put it, dug themselves a rut and begun furnishing it. Ruth wanted to explore how such an unlikely coincidence had happened…assuming it was a coincidence.

“Has to be a reason?” Pop asked when I finished reading him Ms. Crawford’s letter. “Is that what she’s suggesting? I guess she never heard about the twin brothers who won large sums of money in their respective state lotteries on the same day.”

“Well, that might not have been a complete coincidence,” I said. “Assuming, that is, that you didn’t just make the story up on the spur of the moment.”

I gave him space to comment, but he only offered a smile that could have meant anything. Or nothing. So I pressed on.

“I mean, those twins might have grown up in a house where gambling was a big thing. Which would make it a little less unlikely, right? Plus, what about all the lottery tickets they bought that were losers?”

“I’m not getting your point, Mark,” Pop said. Still with the little smile. “Do you even have one?”

“Just that I can understand this woman’s interest in exploring the fact of you and Dave both coming from Nowheresville and blossoming in the middle of your lives.” I raised my hands beside my head as if framing a headline. “Could it be… fate ?”

Pop considered this, rubbing one hand up the white stubble on the side of his deeply lined face. I actually thought he might be about to change his mind and say yes. Then he shook his head. “Just write her one of your nice letters, tell her I’m going to pass, and wish her well on her future endeavors.”

So that was what I did, although something about the way Pop looked just then stuck with me. It was the look of a man who could say quite a lot on the subject of how he and his friend Butch had achieved fame and fortune…but who chose not to. Who chose, in fact, to keep it close.

Ruth Crawford might have been disappointed in Pop’s refusal to be interviewed, but she didn’t drop the project. Nor did she drop it when I also refused to be interviewed, saying my father wouldn’t want me to after he’d said no, and besides, all I knew was that my father had always enjoyed stories. He read a lot, went nowhere without a paperback jammed in his back pocket. He told me wonderful tales at bedtime, and he sometimes wrote them down in spiral notebooks. As for Uncle Butch? He painted a mural in my bedroom—boys playing ball, boys catching fireflies, boys with fishing poles. Ruth wanted to see it, of course, but it had been painted over long ago, when I outgrew such childish things. When first Pop and then Uncle Butch took off like a couple of rockets, I was at the University of Maine, getting a degree in advanced education. Because, according to the old canard, those who can’t do teach, and those who can’t teach, teach teachers. The success of my father and his best friend was, I said, as much a surprise to me as to anyone else in town. There’s another old canard about how no good can come out of Nazareth.

I put that in a letter to Ms. Crawford, because I did feel bad—a little—about not giving her the interview. In it I said they surely had dreams, most men do, and like most men, they kept those dreams to themselves. I had assumed Pop’s stories and Uncle Butch’s cheerful paintings were just hobbies, like whittling or guitar-picking, until the money started rolling in. I typed that, then handwrote a postscript: And good for them!

There are twenty-seven incorporated towns in Castle County. Castle Rock is the largest; Gates Falls is the second largest. Harlow, where I grew up, the son of Laird and Sheila Carmody, isn’t even in the top ten. It’s grown considerably since I was a kid, though, and sometimes my pop—who also spent his whole life in Harlow—said he could hardly recognize it. He went to a one-room school; I went to a four-roomer (two grades in each room); now there’s an eight-room school with geothermal heating and cooling.

When Pop was a kid, all the town roads were unpaved except for Route 9, the Portland Road. When I came along, only Deep Cut and Methodist Road were dirt. These days, all of them are paved. In the sixties there was only one store, Brownie’s, where old men sat around an actual pickle barrel. Now there are two or three, and a kind of downtown (if you want to call it that) on the Quaker Hill Road. We have a pizza joint, two beauty parlors, and—hard to believe but true—a nail salon that seems to be a going concern. No high school, though; that hasn’t changed. Harlow kids have three choices: Castle Rock High, Gates Falls High, or Mountain View Secondary, most commonly known as the Christer Academy. We’re a bunch of country bumpkins out here: pickup-driving, country-music-listening, coffee-brandy-drinking, Republican-leaning hicks from the sticks. There’s nothing much to recommend us, except for two men who came from here: my pop and his friend Butch LaVerdiere. Two talented bastids, as Pop put it during his brief over-the-fence conversation with Ruth Crawford.

Your mom and pop spent their whole lives there ? a city person might ask. And then YOU spent your whole life there? What are you, crazy?

Nope. Sane.

Robert Frost said home is the place that, when you go there, they have to take you in. It’s also the place you start from, and if you’re one of the lucky ones, it’s where you finish up. Butch died in Seattle, a stranger in a strange land. Maybe that was okay with him, but I have to wonder if in the end he wouldn’t have preferred a little dirt road and the lakeside forest known as the 30-Mile Wood.

Although most of Ruth Crawford’s research—her investigation —was centered in Harlow, where her subjects grew up, there are no motels there, not even a bed and breakfast, so her base of operations was the Gateway Motel, in Castle Rock. There actually is a senior living facility in Harlow, and there Ruth interviewed a fellow named Alden Toothaker, who went to school with my pop and his friend. It was Alden who told her how Dave got his nickname. He always carried a tube of Lucky Tiger Butch Wax in his hip pocket and used it frequently so his flattop would stand up straight in front. He wore his hair (what there was of it) that way his whole life. It became his trademark. As to whether he still carried Butch Wax once he got famous, your guess is as good as mine. I don’t know if they even still make it.

“They used to pal around together back in grade school,” Alden told her. “Just a couple of boys who liked to fish or go hunting with their daddies. They grew up around hard work and didn’t expect nothing different. You might talk to folks my age who’ll tellya those boys were going to amount to something, but I’m not one of em. They were ordinary fellas right up until they weren’t.”

Laird and Butch went to Gates Falls High. They were placed in what was then called “the general education” courses, which were for kids who had no plans to go to college. No one came out and said they weren’t bright enough; it was just assumed. They took something called Daily Math and Business English, where several pages of their textbook explained how to correctly fold a business letter, complete with diagrams. They spent a lot of time in woodshop and auto shop. Both played football and basketball, although my pop spent most of his time riding the bench. They both finished with B averages and graduated together on June 8th, 1951.

Dave LaVerdiere went to work with his father, a plumber. Laird Carmody and his dad fixed cars out on the family farm and sold them to Peewee’s Car Mart in Gates Falls. They also kept a vegetable stand on the Portland Road that brought in good money.

Uncle Butch and his father didn’t get along so well and Dave eventually struck out on his own, fixing drains, laying pipe, and sometimes digging wells in Gates and Castle Rock. (His father had all the business in Harlow, and wasn’t about to share). In 1954, the two friends formed L&D Haulage, which mostly meant dragging the summer people’s crappie to the dump. In 1955, they bought the dump and the town was happy to be rid of it. They cleaned it up, did controlled burns, instituted a primitive recycling program, and kept it vermin-free. The town paid them a stipend that made a nice addition to their regular jobs. Scrap metal, especially copper wire, brought in more cash. Folks in town called them the Garbage Twins, but Ruth Crawford was assured by Alden Toothaker (and other oldies with intact memories) that this was harmless ribbing, and taken as such.

The dump was maybe five acres, and surrounded by a high board fence. Dave painted it with murals of town life, adding to it each year. Although that fence is long gone (and the dump is now a landfill), photographs remain. Those murals remind people of Dave’s later work. There were quilting bees that merged into baseball games, baseball games that merged into cartoon caricatures of long-gone Harlow residents, scenes of spring planting and fall reaping. Every aspect of small-town life was represented, but Uncle Butch also added Jesus followed by the apostles (last in line came Judas, with a shit-eating grin on his face). There was nothing really remarkable about any of these scenes, but they were exuberant and good-humored. They were, you might say, harbingers .

Shortly after Uncle Butch died, a LaVerdiere painting of Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe strolling hand-in-hand down the sawdust-floored midway of a small-town carnival sold for three million dollars. It was a thousand times better than Uncle Butch’s dump murals, but it would have looked at home there: the same screwy sense of humor, set off by an undercurrent of despair and—maybe—contempt. Dave’s dump murals were the bud; Elvis & Marilyn was the bloom.

Uncle Butch never married, but Pop did. He’d had a high school sweetheart named Sheila Wise, who went away to Vermont State Teachers College after graduation. When she came back to teach the fifth and sixth grades at Harlow Elementary, my father was delighted to find she was still single. He wooed and won her. They were married in August of 1957. Dave LaVerdiere was Pop’s best man. I came along a year later, and Pop’s best friend became my Uncle Butch.

I read a review of Pop’s first book, The Lightning Storm , and the reviewer said this: “Not much happens in the first hundred or so pages of Mr. Carmody’s suspenseful yarn, but the reader is drawn on anyway, because there are violins.”

I thought that was a clever way to put it. There were few violins for Ruth Crawford to hear; the background picture she got from Alden and others around town was of two men, decent and upstanding and pretty much on the dead level when it came to honesty. They were country men living country lives. One married and the other was what was called “a confirmed bachelor” in those days, but with not a whiff of scandal concerning his private life.

Dave’s younger sister, Vicky, did agree to be interviewed. She told Ruth that sometimes Dave went “up the city”—meaning Lewiston—to visit the beer-and-boogie clubs on lower Lisbon Street. “He’d be jolly at the Holly,” she said, meaning the Holiday Lounge (now long gone). “He was most apt to go if Little Jonna Jaye was playing there. Oh my, such a crush he had on her. He never brought her home—no such luck!—but he didn’t always come home alone, either.”

Vicky paused there, Ruth told me later, and then added, “I know what you might be thinking, Miz Crawford, most everyone does these days when a man spends his life without a longtime woman, but it’s not so. My brother may have turned out to be a famous artist, but he sure as hell wasn’t gay .”

The two men were well liked; everyone said so. And they neighbored . When Philly Loubird had a heart attack with his field half-hayed and thunderstorms in the offing, Pop took him to the hospital in Castle Rock while Butch marshaled a few of his dump-picking buddies and they finished the job before the first drops hit. They fought grassfires and the occasional house fire with the local volunteer fire department. Pop went around with my mother collecting for what was then called the Poor Fund, if he didn’t have too many cars to fix or work to do at the dump. They coached youth sports. They cooked side-by-side at the VFD pork roast supper in the spring and the chicken barbecue that marked the end of summer.

Just country men living country lives.

No violins.

Until there was a whole orchestra.

Copyright © 2024 by Stephen King. From the forthcoming book YOU LIKE IT DARKER: Stories by Stephen King, to be published by Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC. Printed by permission.

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Shedding his Lemony Snicket persona, Daniel Handler lets off some steam

In his new book, “And Then? And Then? What Else?,” the author of “A Series of Unfortunate Events” explores the joys, frustrations and ironies of the writing life.

Writers lead messy lives, constantly condemned to days of lousy first drafts, failed ideas and chronic misstatements. Daniel Handler feels this deeply throughout his kinda-sorta memoir, “ And Then? And Then? What Else? ” Eventually it reaches a boiling point. Late in the book he abandons his quirky-cool demeanor — he’s best known as Lemony Snicket, author of the offbeat children’s books “A Series of Unfortunate Events” — and lets fly with an f-bomb-laden rant about cancel culture and the pressure writers feel to be everything to everyone.

It’s a fierce cri de coeur at a time when books — especially kids’ books — are targeted on the right and writers who misstep on the inclusivity front get targeted on the left. (Oddly, Handler doesn’t mention his own moment as a near-cancelee. Onstage while emceeing the 2014 National Book Awards, he directed a racist watermelon joke at Black author Jacqueline Woodson ; after a social media pile-on, he apologized.) Handler isn’t interested in wading far into the politics of writing today — elsewhere his prose tends toward the gentle, sprightly and personal. Still, it’s not hard to see why he made room for the tirade: He wants to encourage you to give up seeking easy answers about who writers are and how writing works.

“And Then?” — the title comes from a poem by Baudelaire, the namesake of the “Unfortunate Events” siblings — doesn’t have a subtitle to explain itself. But a good one might be “A Memoir of Writerly Confusions.” For Handler, the writing life means forever stepping into frustration and strange ironies. He recalls writing nine drafts for the “Unfortunate Events” movie before being fired from the job — and then being asked to consult on the script, without pay. “Previously I had considered these people innocent,” he says of the moviemakers, “and then maybe dumb, and then maybe a pack of vicious demons. I understood, too, that they were, at least obliquely, the reason I owned a house.”

Plainly, embracing the mess has made him a success: He recalls how some young Lemony Snicket fans were so excited to see him at readings that “bookstores began to have contingency plans for when a child, excited to meet me, threw up.” (The life of a reader can get messy, too.) So understandably, he’s fully embraced the idea of mess-as-process, that successful writing means wrestling with demons. On that front, he’s had a few. In one chapter, he recalls that during his college years he was stalked by visions of malevolent figures, accompanied by seizures that briefly sent him to a psych ward. Recovery wasn’t conquering those visions but making a kind of peace with them: “I still, to this day, see these figures, frequently but not frighteningly, not anymore,” he writes.

That experience has fueled a sensibility in which he does best when he’s open to strangeness. He takes inspiration from the melodrama of opera but also finds joy and insight in tacky kitsch like “Attack of the 50 Foot Woman.” His polestars as an artist are art-film figures like Guy Maddin, who tweaks silent-film conventions, and, most obviously, Edward Gorey, whose not-for-kids-but-really-they-are illustrated stories inspired the Lemony Snicket books’ mordant brilliance. Still, he keeps his heroes at arm’s length: Recalling sending Gorey a fan note, he writes: “I never heard back from Gorey, but shortly afterward he died. I like to think that I killed him.”

Lines like that reflect the sort of tone we want from writer’s guides — intimate, self-deprecating. But these days, we also want them to be practical. The most prominent modern example remains Stephen King’s memoir “On Writing,” and countless others since have borrowed its tone and intention. George Saunders’s “A Swim in the Pond in the Rain” invites us to study classic Russian short stories. In “Essays One,” Lydia Davis brilliantly dismantles her own stories like a car engine. Handler’s book belongs in that company, but he’s skeptical of how much he can offer in terms of practical tips: Whenever he hears the word “process,” he writes, “I wish I could lay my head down on a table.”

Yet there are moments when Handler warms to the role of advice giver. Like every author, he encourages you to read a lot — he recalls the teacher who introduced him to Muriel Spark, the perfect writer for him at just the right time. And he encourages writers to abandon bespoke notebooks and keep it simple; he describes his (yes) process for gathering and reshuffling notes into stories, and how he forgives his sloppy drafts. He’s taken a lesson from his occasional musical collaborator, Magnetic Fields frontman Stephin Merritt, who’s “a devout corraller of happy accidents, encouraging musicians to try the wrong approach, the bonkers note, anything to fill the blanks.”

But all this — Spark, Gorey, B-movies, weird troubling figures in the corner of your eye — doesn’t solve the problem of producing good writing. As for what does, Handler recalls working on a script for a director who sent his draft back pockmarked with the letters “DB,” short for “do better.” Handler was infuriated at the vague note, but he took the lesson: “Now I write it in my own margins all the time, shorthand for I don’t know what’s wrong here but it needs to improve. I want to write better, but I usually don’t know how. Nobody does, really.” For Handler, knowing there’s no right way to do it is the most liberating advice of all.

Mark Athitakis is a critic in Phoenix and the author of “ The New Midwest .”

And Then? And Then? What Else?

By Daniel Handler

Liveright. 240 pp. $26.99

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