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. 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. Like a substantial tranche of horror fiction, much of King’s output is concerned with the battle between good and evil. Seth is autistic and telepathic David believes he has raised a friend from the dead through the power of prayer. Closest cousins to Luke are Seth Garin and David Carver from King’s 1996 “mirror novels”, The Regulators and Desperation respectively. 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. King is more than a little enamoured of the “special child” trope. Stephen King: much of his output is concerned with the battle between good and evil. 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. 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. 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. What they will not be expecting is for Jamieson to vanish. 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.

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.

The institute stephen