A Domestic Animal by Francis King
Published 1970 · 58,025 words · about 4 hours at an average pace
How hard is A Domestic Animal to read?
A Domestic Animal scores 49 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 55 out of 100
- Educated mid-century English.
- Sentence structure: 58 out of 100
- Long, formal, carefully built sentences.
- Abstraction: 50 out of 100
- Concrete social life carrying a study of self-deception.
- Information density: 48 out of 100
- Moderate.
- Narrative indirection: 48 out of 100
- A narrator whose account of his own feelings is not to be trusted.
- Symbolic density: 45 out of 100
- The house and the title do quiet work.
- Ironic distance: 58 out of 100
- Sustained distance between what he says and what he wants.
- Resolution withholding: 50 out of 100
- The ending offers no comfort.
- Structural complexity: 38 out of 100
- Linear retrospective.
How A Domestic Animal is regarded
A Domestic Animal holds a literary regard score of 33 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.