Totalitarian Power as A Source of Horror: The Compositional Features of Stephen King’s “The Institute”

This article examines the compositional features of Stephen King’s The Institute (2019), focusing on the representation of totalitarian power as the principal source of horror in the novel. The study analyzes how King combines the conventions of social horror and speculative fiction to expose the mechanisms of institutional violence, political control, and the dehumanization of the individual. Particular attention is devoted to the novel’s dual narrative structure, which develops through the parallel perspectives of Tim Jamieson and Luke Ellis, as well as to the interaction of linear and nonlinear narrative techniques. The research investigates the artistic functions of shifting narrative perspectives, parallel plotlines, flashbacks, foreshadowing, and spatial opposition between the Front Half and the Back Half of the Institute in generating psychological tension and sustaining suspense. The article further demonstrates that these compositional devices reinforce the novel’s central themes of resistance to authoritarian power, moral responsibility, freedom, and human resilience. The Institute is interpreted as an allegory of totalitarian systems that justify violence in the name of collective security, while the experiences of the imprisoned children symbolize the suppression of individuality under institutional control. The study concludes that King’s mature narrative technique transforms horror into a sophisticated literary form that combines psychological depth with social and political criticism, thereby expanding the artistic possibilities of contemporary horror fiction.

Stephen King, The Institute, horror fiction

McAleer P. Déjà vu Destroyed: On Stephen King’s The Institute [Электронный ресурс] // Los Angeles Review of Books. – 2019. – October 12. – Режим доступа: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/deja-vu-destroyed-on-stephen-kings-the-institute/ (дата обращения: 11.11.2024).

Medical paranoia and the Big State in Stephen King’s The Institute [Электронный ресурс] // The Victorian Sage. – 2021. – December 27. – Режи доступа: https://thevictoriansage.wordpress.com/2021/12/27/medical-paranoia-and-the-big-state-in-stephen-kings-the-institute/ (дата обращения: 11.12.2024).

Hinzen W., Werning M., Machery E. (Eds.). The Oxford Handbook of Compositionality. – Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. – 746 p.

Worsham J., Kalita J. Genre identification and the compositional effect of genre in literature // Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics. – Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA: Association for Computational Linguistics, 2018. – Рp. 1963–1973.

King S. The institute. – New York: Simon and Schuster, 2019.

King S. It. – New York: Viking, 1986. – 1138 p.

King S. The shining. – New York: Doubleday, 1977. – 447 p.