Stephen King, the Blacker, the Bleaker

THE BLACKER, THE BLEAKER

STEPHEN KING — THE INSTITUTE — 2019

This is not Stephen King’s best book, because he never had a best-book. They are all different and all good in different ways and this one is both science fiction, mad scientist, crooked politician, secret global order, fear and fright of war, and above all children, many children, and by children, I mean most of them before puberty. And it is absolutely perverse because our world is still in many ways perverse. This being said, I can easily assert that this book brings us a new facet of Stephen King’s storytelling at least as strong as The Dead Zone, The Stand, and The Green Line, and you will recognize echoes to Carrie, Christine, and Firestarter, among many others.

The first part will feel slow maybe and not that eventful for quite a while, just things coming and people going, and events happening in a small town in South Carolina, all seen from the point of view of an ex-cop from Sarasota who has just resigned and decided to move on. To New York, he was saying, and I am afraid he is bound to stay in this tobacco and sweet potato giant garden that South Carolina is, with its soil slightly reddish. I have never been in Du Pray or South Carolina. I crossed it once. But I was not very far in Dunn North Carolina for long enough to enjoy that red earth and the fields of sweet potatoes, tobacco and other crops growing abundantly under the Carolinian climate. But this first part is going to give to the novel its real depth. So do not skip pages.

The book raises many questions about the present, the world we are living in, the world of “T***p . . . that big city dumbs**t. . . “ (page 543). Sorry for the stars but the word would be censored on any “decent” reviewing site. When you are dealing with political science fiction the reviewer, the critic cannot even dream of using the language of the author of the book under review because of Main Street decency, which is, in fact, Main Drag hypocrisy. The book intends to make us shiver with fright at the idea that for once in a long time a US President could decide to press on…