“In the Dark, All the Shadows Disappear”: Remodelling the Poetics of Gripping Horror in Stephen King’s The Institute

Abstract

Abstract Transformations in the perception of horror by modern readers have provoked an increased tolerance for cruelty and death. This increase challenges authors to use special means of emotional arousal in order to appeal to contemporary audiences. One of Stephen King’s most recent books, The Institute (2019), is replete with such special means. The novel deals with unspeakable terror and centres on a group of psychic kids kidnapped and placed in brutal conditions to serve the dark purposes of powerful men. This article explores King’s ways of expressing horror by affecting universal human experiences, emotions, and feelings. It applies an interdisciplinary perspective based on psychological and hermeneutic approaches to argue that in the non-otherworldly and non-monster horror The Institute, King involves a combination of vocabulary inventions, syntactic transformations, letter emphases, and refined literary devices to create a terrifying atmosphere. These means are explicated in the article to argue that the violation of human rights and fundamental freedoms is, in many ways, more shocking and frightening than traditional bloody images. They help King remodel a dark realm of gripping horror, where fear arises primarily out of a sense of the distorted world order, and enable the writer to critique social institutions for their approval of horrendous harm.