Second, in creating human 'weapons' to be used against perceived enemies, the Institute has created a weapon to be used against itself. The first is the fact that Institute personnel, in focusing so completely on Luke's minor telekinetic abilities, ignore the one weapon he can use against them: his prodigious intellect. Two notable ironies drive the novel to its conclusion. It also destroys the moral compass of those who work there too long.

The Institute, King tells us, not only destroys its chosen victims. And even fewer have the imaginative resources that King brings to bear on his portrait of life at the Institute, a life filled with cruelty and a chilling indifference to its effect on the vulnerable. Few writers have King's ability to create credible young people whose nascent qualities prefigure the adults they will (with luck) become. The bulk of the action takes place in the Institute itself and focuses on the concerted efforts of a group of traumatized kids to understand their abilities - and to use them against their captors. The Institute is a very different sort of book that takes an equally hard look at who - and what - we have become. Last year's Elevation was a lovely, fable-like novella about the divisions running like fault lines through the country. Lately, King has turned his empathetic vision outward, addressing the social and political crises pressing down on us all. More central to his enduring popularity is his ability to create textured, credible portraits of real people beset by appalling circumstances and struggling, often futilely, to survive.

But King's ability to generate world-class scares has never been the most important aspect of his work. King once famously remarked on his willingness to 'go for the gross-out' in fiction and he has done so to great effect over many books and many years. Beneath its extravagant plot and typically propulsive prose, the book is animated by a central concern that could not be more relevant: the inhumane treatment of children. The Institute is the latest to emerge, and it is classic King, with an extra measure of urgency and anger. Always prolific, King seems to have tapped into a bottomless reservoir of narrative. His output during this period includes more than 20 novels and several collections of short fiction, along with numerous screenplays and assorted nonfiction. The Institute by Stephen King focuses on the inhumane treatment of children - in this case, children with special abilities.

Stephen kings the institute