The cruelty is the point.

Kids with eerie mental powers get harrassed by mysterious agency and have to band together to control their powers and escape. Yeah, King has written variations on this several times (most notably FIrestarter, I guess), and the actual super-officially-natural element here isn't the most interesting bit about it. But there's a difference between writing it in the 80s and in the digital Trump era; so The Institute becomes a story not just about telechinesis and what happens to you when you start hearing others' thoughts, but also about the organisations that prey on it and how they would work. A story about how people can convince themselves to willingly give up all empathy and become monsters convinced they're the good guys doing What Must Be Done - and doing it so by rote that it's barely even a professional organisation anymore. There's an Omelas angle here that's got some holes in it (many of them deliberate, but not all), and there's some absolutely chilling villain POVs that build on what he did in Doctor Sleep. Above all it's just a good old fashioned King romp that's hard to put down. It's been a while since I read him, and I'm sorry about that.