Which C.S. Lewis novel follows the character Mark Studdock at a sinister institute?

That Hideous Strength follows Mark Studdock at a sinister institute called the National Institute of Coordinated Experiments.

Published in 1945, the novel is the final volume of C.S. Lewis’s Cosmic Trilogy, following Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra. Unlike the earlier books, it is set mainly on Earth, in an English university town and surrounding countryside.

Mark Studdock is a sociologist who is drawn into the institute’s plans because he wants status and professional advancement. His wife, Jane, has a series of troubling dreams, and the plot brings together scientific ambition, political manipulation, spiritual conflict, and older Arthurian themes.

The novel’s title comes from a quotation associated with the sixteenth-century English poet Sir David Lyndsay. Readers sometimes place the book outside the trilogy because it shifts from interplanetary travel to a more recognizably British setting, but it is the trilogy’s concluding volume.