City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett

How hard is City of Stairs to read?

City of Stairs scores 40 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: 48 out of 100

Bennett deploys a consistent invented lexicon — drekels, djinnifrit, mhovost, philosopher's stones, the Blink — alongside bureaucratic terminology (polis governor, Worldly Regulations, cultural ambassador) and six Divinity-specific mythologies. Readers track invented terms continuously, though Bennett embeds meaning in context rather than demanding prior knowledge. The vocabulary load resembles a well-managed secondary-world fantasy: denser than Gatsby, lighter than Gravity's Rainbow.

Sentence structure: 40 out of 100

Sentences are confident and varied — often long, clause-laden, and ironic, but always navigable. Bennett favors embedded internal monologue and parenthetical asides to signal Shara's intelligence-analyst mind. The prose never approaches Jamesian hypotaxis or Faulknerian recursion; it reads like a sharply written literary thriller rather than experimental fiction.

Abstraction: 45 out of 100

The novel embeds its most abstract arguments — about the nature of divine power, how belief shapes reality, how colonial history determines the present — inside scenes of investigation and action. The Olvos conversation in the final chapters is the book's most explicitly philosophical passage, raising questions about historical causation, divine will, and inherited guilt. These ideas are substantial but always grounded in character and plot.

Information density: 55 out of 100

The worldbuilding load is considerable: six defunct Divinities with competing mythologies, a colonial occupation spanning seventy-five years, the political stratification of Saypur vs. the Continent, and the mechanics of miraculous artifacts. Bennett distributes exposition through dialogue, legal proceedings, and scholarly epigraphs rather than blocks of backstory — but attentive tracking is required throughout. Comparable to Midnight's Children in density, though more thriller-paced.

Narrative indirection: 38 out of 100

The third-person close narration with Shara is largely transparent — her deductions and doubts are shared directly with the reader. The major dramatic irony (Vinya's possible compromise, Shara's true lineage) is revealed through inference from Shara's observation, not withheld from the reader arbitrarily. Bennett writes for intelligent but not initiatory readers.

Symbolic density: 55 out of 100

The city's stairs — fragments of stairways leading nowhere after the Blink restructured reality — stand for a history that was severed mid-step. The Worldly Regulations as cultural erasure mirror real-world colonial policies of religious suppression. The six absent Divinities function as a sustained meditation on gods who sanctioned empire, and whose death left both colonizer and colonized bereft of meaning. These allegories are legible without annotation.

Ironic distance: 35 out of 100

The text operates in earnest mode most of the time: the spy-thriller mechanics are sincere, the political stakes genuine, and Shara's grief over Efrem is unironic. Some gentle irony attaches to Shara performing the 'drab cultural ambassador' role while commanding the actual situation — a joke the reader and Shara share at others' expense. The tone is dry and observational rather than satirical.

Resolution withholding: 25 out of 100

The main mystery resolves cleanly: Pangyui's murderer is identified, the Restorationists are defeated, and the Divinity threat is neutralized. The ending is bittersweet — Vo's fate, Shara's permanent light sensitivity, the devastated city — but not ambiguous. Plot threads are tied, and the sequel hook is earned rather than evasive.

Structural complexity: 30 out of 100

The narrative is essentially linear, following Shara's investigation from her arrival in Bulikov through its climactic resolution over about ten days. Flashbacks are brief and purposeful: Sigrud's backstory, Shara's memories of training Efrem, the backstory of the Kaj's Night of the Red Sands. Scholarly epigraphs from Pangyui's writings head each chapter, providing historical context. The structure is clean and conventionally novelistic.

How City of Stairs is regarded

City of Stairs holds a literary regard score of 35 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.

About the author

Robert Jackson Bennett