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"The Institute" was good enough to get me back into a Stephen King sooner than I normally would. I hope it doesn't backfire.
His books tend to run out of steam right at the end, so you can't even bail until it's too late usually.
I'm so down with this, it's got enough levels to play on that I can't imagine not being satisfied by at least one of them.
The pacing is interesting. It should be at climax but I'm only a third in. Are there really enough pieces set up to fall for the rest of the book? I don't think so. And I don't have a clue what the next arc will be, so... I'm delighted.
I'm delighted by the depth of the character, and the effort going into the separate narratives driving this thing. At this point I'm expecting a convergence of the autobio thread and the realtime thread, though I'm still ready to be surprised.
The girl he saves from the road is a knife in my gut, the scene too real and visceral.
It's been a pleasurable journey. Not at all where I was expecting, and I feel like there's better places to go, but there's still time for it to get wild or get worse. We'll see.
Someone told me that the SK books are more about the ride and the feelings along the way than the end. They're right.
When I started the layers seemed to offer an incredible amount of options, but in the end (or in the 86%) so far, I've discovered a narrative more in line with reality than I expected. I suppose there's still time to do a switcheroo, but there's no way this'll end up being the crazy book I was expecting from 0-24%.
I don't want to set any expectations for others... but that's one of the best SK endings I've read. Because I tempered my own expecations? Because it really was that good? I dont know. The bar is certainly different.