 Hello everybody, E here. Welcome back to another Stephen King book review today! We are finally talking about Dun Dun Dun, the Institute, yes. This cover is alright, but it's nowhere near as pretty as the UK version. I highly suggest, I'll try and remember to stick it right here, but not only is that one just absolutely brilliant, and I think it actually fits the story more than this one. Even though it's a smaller part of the story, I think this one fits a little bit better, and the Waterstones version in the UK has these beautiful blue, they're not endpapers, but you know how sometimes the pages will be colored? There's this blue. Look it up. It is a fantastic version, but y'all don't care about that. Y'all care about whether or not I like this book? And hell, yes, I like this book. I discussed in my review for The Outsider how it will probably end up in my top five. If it was going to end up in my top five, this one bumped it off. Now for those of you sitting out there going, oh my god, every single new Stephen King book is your favorite Stephen King book. No, because I hated sleeping beauties, I hated elevation, and I disliked for the most part Dr. Sleep. I absolutely loved Revival, and I loved The Outsider. The Hodges trilogy is great. It's fine. Nowhere near my favorites though, but this one, let me explain why, because that's why you're here without the spoilers. By the way, the spoiler review will be up directly after this one, and then Thursday Theorist episode will be next Thursday. The reason why I love this one so much is because Stephen King hasn't written good kid characters in forever. I loved every single person, every single one of the characters, period, but Luke, Kalisha, was it Nick, I'm going to get confused here because I know I'm going to end up stumbling into it territory. This book is nothing like it, but every time I think about a group of kids, so on and so forth, Avery was a fantastic character. His character arc was amazing, and I had so much fun reading about it. All these kids were great, and I felt that each one had their own individual characteristics and their own personalities. One of the problems that I have with Dreamcatcher is Jonesy and the other guys just kind of blend together. Beef, and I think it's Pete, or is Pete, I don't know, but when they're kids, they're kind of, it's kind of toss away characters. They're all just kind of the same entity it felt like. And of course, Beef was the foul mouth one, but I feel these are the best kids characters that King has written in a long time. And I heard some people talking on Twitter, even in some reviews on Goodreads, that these kids, this is not how kids talk. I beg to differ. I have a very intelligent teenage son who talks just like that, who talks exactly like this, gone with the wind references and everything. I had one person say, these kids don't talk like that. And I said, well, smart kids do talk like that. They said, well, mine doesn't. Game set match. I mean, I just really not have nothing else to say about that. But these kids were believable, whereas you have other authors who completely fail entirely to write children. Paul Tremblay's one of them. Disappearance at Devil's Rock was, it felt forced and just, it felt idiotic, if I'm honest. But in this one, the characters felt real. They felt alive. And I've got to talk about the way the book opens. It's the elephant in the room. Holy shit, the first 40 pages of this book feels like, what am I reading? I honestly thought that someone, because I had an issue with this with the Heruki Minakami book, Killing Commodatory, I honestly thought that someone printed the wrong first 40 pages of this book. And if it wasn't for the fact that I knew this was Stephen King's voice, I probably would have either tried to return the book or look up if there was any issues of it or something like that, because it was a completely different experience from what I was expecting. You're reading about this disgraced cop who is trying to get on the plane. This is the very first opening pages, by the way, so no real spoilers. And he doesn't get on the plane and instead he moves on down the road and it's about him rebuilding his life. And then you don't hear anything else from him for hundreds of pages. It goes into the Institute and the story starts for real. And then by the end of it, everything comes together in one of Stephen King's best endings of all time. I got goosebumps right now. I don't know if y'all can see that, but I have goosebumps just thinking about it. The last 200 pages, well, okay, not the last 200 pages. I think about the last 20 or 30 pages is like an epilogue wrap-up, but the 100 pages before that, there ain't no putting the book down. I had an absolute blast with this book and I've been telling everybody, yeah, it's good. It's okay, because I've been containing my excitement for this book. And honestly, I didn't want any spoilers. I was loving it so much. After I read those first 40 pages, I shut down. Luckily, I had videos for you guys. But I shut down completely and I ran off to finish this book because I didn't want any spoilers. I didn't even want anybody popping up. And they did. There was about 12 comments that were like, I just don't think it's that good of a book or I feel like it's bloated or I feel like this or that or the other. I didn't want to hear it. And you guys know I love to hear differing opinions from you guys, but this time I just didn't want to hear it because I was enjoying it so damn much. Now, the other elephant in the room or as Jack Ketchum might say, the 800 pound gorilla in the room is how this is being marketed. And there was another problem with another Stephen King book, The Bazaar of Bad Dreams, which I'm going to go ahead and pull off because we're going to talk about this very, very quickly. If you look at this cover and the way it was marketed, this looks like a horror novel or a collection of horror stories. You look at the back. It's all horror, baby. It looks, it's nothing but horror. That just screams horror. It's not a collection of horror stories. It's a collection of literary fiction. And there might be one or two stories that do tickle the horror notes. But for the most part, it's just a story of, because the best stories in there like Batman and Ramen have an altercation and there's several other ones. The best stories in there are not horror. This is not a horror novel whatsoever. They're talking about how terrifying it is, how it's his best novel since it or whatever the hell they're saying. The book does have its frightening moments, but it's because of frightening concepts. There's no, the bad guys are scary to an extent, but we're dealing with human monsters this time. But the book has no creepiness. There's nothing like that whatsoever. It's the theme that is horrifying. It asks one of the best questions ever put down. And this is why I'm sticking it up there. Maybe not higher than revival, but it's definitely not as good as it or Pet Cemetery or revival, but it's floating down there somewhere with a bag of bones in my top five, if you know what my top five are. This one asks a question that disturbed me. And it's one of those questions that you can really, you can really break down and think about for ages. How far do we go as a civilization to continue being a civilization? To continue being civilized? What would we do? What extent would we go to to make sure that everything stays the way it is? To maintain the status quo? To make sure that our family and our friends and our neighbors and all of our loved ones are fine? What lengths would we go to to make that happen? And while the book, I don't believe that the book was written around the time of these, the camps with the migrant children, but it is a great allegory for that. What lengths are we willing to go to to make sure that our laws are upheld? I guess is what I'm getting at there. Speaking of politics, there are a couple pot shots at Trump. So if that kind of thing turns you off, if that kind of thing upsets you, they are very brief. There's total of three sentences in this, well, two pot shots and one other sentence talking about just Trump's picture on the wall. And the picture on the wall, I believe the person who has that picture on the wall is a good to moderate character. It's not a villain talking about, you know, being a Trumpist or whatever you Trumpist. But it's not a villain that has this picture of Trump on the wall. I believe there's one more comment about Hillary Clinton, why she lost. So there are four, I'd say four to five political things in here, but they are four to five sentences, not paragraphs, nothing like that. Now, after this video, we're going to go into the spoiler section. I'm not going to be talking about any of the connections or anything in the spoiler discussion. We're just going to talk about the notes in the book that I couldn't talk about here. But if you wait for, there's a metric ton of stuff in this book that ties in to Stephen King's other works, but this is not a shop novel. At least it's not called the shop. And that is one of the things that I am going to leave here. It's kind of a teaser going into the spoiler discussion. But if you've read the book, I'd love to see you there. It'll be up right after this one. Have you read the Institute? Did you enjoy it? Did you not enjoy it? I would love to hear why you liked it or why you didn't like it. I always prefer that people actually explain why they liked or disliked something, because I loved it and it sucks are kind of on par with me. That doesn't tell me anything whatsoever. So I would love to talk to you about it down there in the doobly-doo. That's why I have this channel so I can get to know my viewers so I can have book discussions with my friends. But until next time, I have been E, you have been U. This has been another Stephen King Book Review. I'll talk to you guys later. Bye-bye!