It’s only natural for someone as outspoken as King - check his Twitter feed at any given moment and you’re likely to see his dissatisfaction with the current presidential administration - to speak to some of today’s more urgent political problems in his work. They can be asked of a country with a mass shooting epidemic, or a humanitarian crisis at the border.

These questions don’t merely exist within a King horror-world of secret institutions and children with the power to see the future. (As Vox nicely put it: “The philosophical problem of killing baby Hitler.”) At its core, The Institute asks at what cost we as a society are willing to shield ourselves from possible danger - and, perhaps more importantly, what we should be classifying as dangerous to begin with. It’s an eternal ethical question King is playing with. Readers are left to wonder: Are these flashes to the future enough to warrant killing possible threats in cold blood, years before they commit a crime? Luke posits that there are too many factors that come into play, making it nearly impossible for these precognitive flashes (years and even decades before the events actually happen) to be that accurate. Luke knows he has to escape before he’s taken to the Back Half the only question is how. But new kids keep coming as old friends disappear into the terrifyingly mysterious Back Half. He meets young people just like him: Avery, Kalisha, Nicky, George. Luke is brought to the Front Half of the Institute, where children are subjected to tests, nearly drowned in tanks of water as a torture method, and interrogated about their abilities.

In the book’s beginning stages, they kidap him and murder his parents. They’re more concerned about Luke’s powers, and they’re not messing around. Everyone is focused on his intelligence - except the Institute, a secret organization that specializes in kidnapping children. (As he frequently reminds, he can at least make pizza pans shake in times of high emotion.) He also happens to be a genius: He’s about to head for Boston to take classes at MIT and Emerson, even though he’s six years shy of standard college age. The Institute centers on Luke Ellis, a 12-year-old kid who has small but potent telekinetic powers. Indeed, while King’s most recent fiction is still keeping readers on the edge of their seat, it’s also leaving us with something deeper to think about. It’s the kind of sentiment we’re seeing more from the best-selling author these days. “I hope the world doesn’t end because of us,” a character says near the end of Stephen King’s latest novel, The Institute. Warning: This article contains spoilers from The Institute, by Stephen King.

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