Deacon King Kong by James McBride
Published 2020 · 544 pages · 100,000 words · about 7 hours at an average pace · Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, Mystery & Crime
How hard is Deacon King Kong to read?
Deacon King Kong scores 26 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it relatively accessible. 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: 28 out of 100
- Brooklyn vernacular. 1960s slang. Church language.
- Sentence structure: 30 out of 100
- Abstraction: 22 out of 100
- Concrete, character-driven. Ideas emerge from community dynamics.
- Information density: 42 out of 100
- Dense with characters, subplots, and historical detail.
- Narrative indirection: 25 out of 100
- Multiple storylines circling the central mystery.
- Symbolic density: 22 out of 100
- The cheese, the church, the flagpole—all carry symbolic weight.
- Ironic distance: 22 out of 100
- Warm, comic irony throughout. McBride loves his characters.
- Resolution withholding: 25 out of 100
- Why Sportcoat shot Deems withheld. Multiple subplots slowly resolve.
- Structural complexity: 28 out of 100
- Polyphonic narrative with a dozen major characters and interweaving subplots.
How Deacon King Kong is regarded
Deacon King Kong holds a literary regard score of 48 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.