Plain Bad Heroines by Emily M. Danforth
Published 2020 · 165,000 words · about 11 hours at an average pace · Horror, Literary Fiction
How hard is Plain Bad Heroines to read?
Plain Bad Heroines scores 55 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: 48 out of 100
- Literary prose with period vocabulary in the historical sections, film-industry jargon in the modern sections, and the narrator's arch, allusive register throughout.
- Sentence structure: 52 out of 100
- The omniscient narrator's voice is elaborate, parenthetical, and self-aware. Footnotes, direct address, and metafictional commentary create syntactic variety.
- Abstraction: 55 out of 100
- The novel is simultaneously a Gothic story and a commentary on Gothic stories. The metafictional layer interrogates how horror narratives exploit queer suffering.
- Information density: 50 out of 100
- Three timelines, a large cast, footnotes, and embedded texts. The novel is long and densely packed with historical, literary, and cultural information.
- Narrative indirection: 58 out of 100
- Three braided timelines, an intrusive narrator, and the blurred boundary between the historical tragedy and its fictional reenactment. The reader must track correspondences across eras.
- Symbolic density: 60 out of 100
- Yellow jackets as nature's punishment and desire's sting. The apple orchard as a corrupted Eden. The film adaptation as the repetition compulsion of trauma. Mary MacLane's book as the dangerous text that enables queer self-recognition.
- Ironic distance: 58 out of 100
- The narrator's metafictional commentary creates sustained ironic distance. The novel knows it is doing what it critiques—telling a story about queer women being punished—and acknowledges the contradiction.
- Resolution withholding: 45 out of 100
- The horror resolves partially—some characters survive, others do not—but the curse's nature and the narrator's identity remain provocatively unclear.
- Structural complexity: 60 out of 100
- Three braided timelines, an omniscient intrusive narrator, footnotes, embedded texts, and a meta-layer about the construction of horror narratives. Ambitious formal architecture.
How Plain Bad Heroines is regarded
Plain Bad Heroines holds a literary regard score of 50 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.