Hard Rain Falling by Don Carpenter
Published 1966 · 84,700 words · about 6 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction
How hard is Hard Rain Falling to read?
Hard Rain Falling scores 50 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. 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: 45 out of 100
- Plain American vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 48 out of 100
- Direct, unfussy sentences.
- Abstraction: 48 out of 100
- Concrete, with an existential argument underneath.
- Information density: 50 out of 100
- Moderate across two decades.
- Narrative indirection: 48 out of 100
- A close third person on a man who cannot articulate himself.
- Symbolic density: 48 out of 100
- The pool hall and the prison carry weight.
- Ironic distance: 52 out of 100
- Distance between Jack's inarticulacy and the novel's understanding.
- Resolution withholding: 62 out of 100
- The ending is bleak and open.
- Structural complexity: 45 out of 100
- Three parts across a life.
How Hard Rain Falling is regarded
Hard Rain Falling holds a literary regard score of 42 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.