The Institute

Luke Ellis is twelve, sharper than most adults in the room, and then his parents are gone and he wakes up somewhere called the Institute. It looks almost like a school. It is not a school.

The other children there can move things or hear things they shouldn't be able to, and nobody who runs the place is interested in explaining why they've all been brought together. That's the sort of set-up that gets under my skin more than any jump scare: ordinary kids, a building with rules nobody agreed to, and adults who talk about them like they're equipment.

Stephen King doing institutional dread rather than a haunted house is its own kind of unsettling, the fear of paperwork and locked doors rather than anything supernatural. It's a thick one, so it wants a proper night in, blanket arranged, phone away, the kind of read you don't want interrupted by anyone knocking.

Worth it if you like your horror grounded and your child-in-peril stories with brains behind the menace rather than just scares for their own sake.