No kid ever comes back from the Back Half. After a few weeks, most of them will be transferred to the Back Half, a part of the Institute shrouded in rumor. If the kids comply, they get tokens good for treats from vending machines that offer snacks, booze and even cigarettes. 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. He meets a girl named Kalisha who gives him the lay of the land and introduces him to the other inmates, all kids. 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. 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. He takes a gig as a sort of semi-official night patrolman and finds he rather likes the place. 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.

Innocent children are tormented in “The Institute,” but the people who do it are much like you and me. It has no ghosts, no vampires, no metamorphosing diabolical entities or invaders from other dimensions intent on tormenting innocent children. 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. We can see something of ourselves in these characters, and recognize in them our own capacity for evil.

” 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.

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.

Stephen king the institute