The success of The Institute, though, is in the way it repurposes this familiar material to spotlight a 21st-century US in crisis corrupted and compromised and mired in debt. After more than 50 profitable years in the business, the author has long since hit the point where he’s circling back on himself, revisiting themes he’s covered in the past (in this case supernatural children and a mammoth dark-state conspiracy). Hell, while they’re about it, they might even namecheck some previous Stephen King publications – specifically Firestarter, The Shining, Dreamcatcher and Carrie. They might also have cited Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, another dystopian tale of battery-farmed children. In casting about to get their bearings, the Institute’s inmates helpfully reference Pleasure Island and the witch’s cage from Hansel and Gretel. They’re simply clocking in and out, following orders and processing kids. These people wouldn’t consider themselves to be sadists, exactly.

King’s villains, it transpires, are a bunch of middle-management automatons, headhunted from the US military or plucked from well-paid careers at Halliburton. And if The Institute finally lacks the pure jolting terror of Lampwick’s transformation into a jackass, it compensates with an atmosphere of creeping dread and a keen awareness of the cogs and wheels of bureaucratic evil. They’re being slowly fattened for the kill. They’re plied with cigarettes and alcohol. Instead, its inhabitants are forcibly abducted from their homes at night and installed as laboratory rats by a shadowy government organisation. Misguided or not, the kids in Pinocchio are at least clamouring to visit Pleasure Island, which is more than can be said for the pint-sized inmates of Stephen King’s meaty, satisfying slab of high-concept pulp fiction. Come daybreak they will have been transformed into donkeys, herded into crates and put to work in the mines.

They can drink and smoke and shoot pool at their leisure, blissfully unaware that the theme park is, in fact, a nightmarish factory or sulphurous processing plant. At Pleasure Island, behind high, bolted gates, the town’s tearaways are promised a life free from societal interference. “E ver been to Pleasure Island?” asks Lampwick, the rowdy, doomed delinquent from Disney’s Pinocchio, as the stagecoach spirits a cargo of children through the darkened streets and clear out of the world.

The institute book stephen king