The Science of Stephen King

While Stephen King has masterfully tackled familiar frights: vampires, ghosts, and everything in between, in his sixty-first novel The Institute, the element of fear is rooted in something much more real: the government. As the author explains, the autumn of 2019 seemed like the perfect time to release The Institute. “All I can say is that I wrote it in the Trump era. I’ve felt more and more a sense that people who are weak, and people who are disenfranchised and people who aren’t the standard, white American, are being marginalized,” King said in a recent New York Times interview. “And at some point in the course of working on the book, Trump actually started to lock kids up … that was creepy to me because it was really like what I was writing about.”1

While King admits there is an obvious allegory one could draw from Trump’s border policy to the children trapped in his novel, he makes certain to point out that this was not his original intention, but rather a fortuitous accident. He further asserts in the Guardian, “children are imprisoned and enslaved all over the world. Hopefully, people who read The Institute will find a resonant chord with this administration’s cruel and racial policies.”2

As of 2019, Belgian nine-year-old Laurent Simons is the youngest college graduate in the world.

The novel centers on Luke Ellis, a highly precocious preteen who is on the cusp of college at only twelve years old. One night, Luke’s life is forever changed when strangers, who we learn are employed by the mysterious institute, murder his parents and kidnap him. Once awake in a strange, school-like building, Luke meets a group of children who have met the same terrible fate. In fact, it is not Luke’s unique intelligence that is the cause of his capture, but rather his tendency to break objects when angry. With his mind, of course.

While Luke doesn’t have the impressive powers of Carrie White or even Firestarter’s (1980) Charlie McGee, he is of great interest to the researchers of the Institute. There is already a file of information on Luke’s life and abilities, including the fact that he is TK, shorthand for telekinetic. Forced to undergo painful shots, humiliating medical tests, and most brutal of all, no contact with the outside world, the kids of the Institute quickly become friends. They share in one simple goal, to escape the fences beyond the industrial building and regain their freedom.

Luke’s friends include Avery, petite and scared from his new circumstances. Avery’s telepathic power, or, as he’s known in the novel, TP pos, is more potent than Luke’s. Friend Kalisha, too, holds a telepathic power, rooted in a deep empathy, that will aid in their escape. But, before Luke and friends can work against the people at the Institute, the reader is introduced to the “Back Half,” a building beyond, where kids disappear to, and never return from. While the “Front Half’” is not pleasant, the “Back Half” is where the true Stephen King horror blossoms. There, kids as young as six, both TP and TK, are used as weapons against American enemies. Their minds are harnessed into a supernatural energy, which is then directed to murder. Eventually, this breaks down the children’s psyche. They lose their personality, their mind. They are husks of their former selves. It is the worst kind of zombie, bred by the government and then left to suffer after their task is done.

Politics aside, the plot of The Institute mirrors widely known experiments conducted by the CIA decades ago. While the real American government certainly would not admit to any sort of similar doings, they have released information on a controversial top-secret project entitled MK-Ultra. According to History.com, “MK-Ultra was a top-secret CIA project in which the agency conducted hundreds of clandestine experiments—sometimes on unwitting US citizens—to assess the potential use of LSD and other drugs for mind control, information gathering, and psychological torture. Project MK-Ultra lasted from 1953 until about 1973.”3

LSD-25 was used in MK-Ultra experiments, sometimes on unwilling patients. The potent drug can cause auditory and visual hallucinations, as well as altered awareness of one’s surroundings.

It would be reassuring to believe that studies of telekinesis exist in only fiction, yet in 1975, the documents on MK-Ultra were released, outlining twenty years of tax-funded research.

Donald Ewen Cameron was an MK-Ultra contributor.