How do you maintain your dignity and your humanity in an environment designed to strip you of both? That theme, such an urgent one in literature from the 20th century onward, falls well within King’s usual purview. His heroes are often humble or apparently weak: children, working-class stiffs, abused women, the poor, the disabled and the overlooked — people who must summon the courage to fight back against seemingly impossible odds. “The Institute” follows this pattern, but it has some additional fish to fry. Almost as much of the novel is devoted to the staff of the Institute: Mrs. Sigsby, the fanatical director; the security chief, Trevor Stackhouse; assorted doctors, assistants and janitors; and one cleaning lady who, in secret, becomes the children’s only adult ally. From these passages we learn that the people who work in the Institute tell themselves that whatever they’re doing serves a higher good. “Nothing less than the fate of the world was in their hands,” Mrs. Sigsby thinks, “as it had been in the hands of those who had come before them. Not just the survival of the human race, but the survival of the planet. … No one who fully grasped the Institute’s work could regard it as monstrous.”

How does a human being become someone who can regard the abuse of children as, first, a necessary evil, and then, finally, as a matter of routine? That’s a question with undeniable political relevance at this moment. King has made his contempt for the current president, his administration and his policies abundantly clear on Twitter and in other public statements. “The Institute,” which takes more than one overt dig at Trump, ruminates on the people who carry out the administration’s policies on the ground, the sort of working folk he usually champions. Looking at the woman charged with shepherding the children to their dreadful appointments, Luke “realized he wasn’t a child at all to her. She had made some crucial separation in her mind. He was a test subject. You made it do what you wanted, and if it didn’t, you administered what the psychologists called negative reinforcement. And when the tests were over? You went down to the break room for coffee and Danish and talked about your own kids (who were real kids) or bitched about politics, sports, whatever.”