Still here by A.J. Knight
Published 2024 · 48,341 words · about 3 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Romance, LGBTQ+ Fiction
How hard is Still here to read?
Still here scores 33 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: 28 out of 100
- The prose uses plain, contemporary vocabulary throughout—words like 'tunneled,' 'lingered,' and 'intentional' represent the ceiling of complexity. No specialized terminology, archaic language, or invented words appear. The register is accessible literary fiction aimed at a broad adult readership.
- Sentence structure: 30 out of 100
- Sentences are short to medium length, favoring declarative and simple compound constructions. Knight occasionally layers two short sentences for rhythm ('The words landed like a punch to the face. Ellis's vision tunneled.') but never ventures into subordinate-heavy or experimentally fragmented territory. Dialogue is crisp and undemanding.
- Abstraction: 32 out of 100
- The novel grounds itself almost entirely in concrete scene and felt emotion—a record store under threat, a father's death, two men circling each other. Emotional interiority is rendered directly rather than through philosophical abstraction. The opening epigraph hints at thematic resonance but the narrative stays close to character experience.
- Information density: 28 out of 100
- At under 50,000 words, the novel moves efficiently but lightly. Scenes develop one tension at a time, and emotional beats are given space to land rather than competing with historical or thematic complexity. Readers are guided clearly through each development without juggling multiple narrative threads.
- Narrative indirection: 40 out of 100
- Knight withholds some information—the ghost or supernatural element hinted in the opening and final sample, Ellis's interior resistance to Issaky—but the central tensions are stated plainly rather than left for inference. Nick-like filtering is absent; the narrator sits close to Ellis and tells us what he feels.
- Symbolic density: 42 out of 100
- The record store functions as an inherited world worth preserving, and the ghost-written letter in the opening frames the space as sanctuary against fear. Vinyl records, their misplaced sleeves, and the physical shop accumulate mild symbolic weight around memory and identity, but the symbolism is suggestive rather than layered or systematic.
- Ironic distance: 22 out of 100
- The narrative is earnest and emotionally direct. Knight does not deploy irony between narrator and reader; when Ellis is hurt or angry, the text registers that hurt straight. The only light tonal play comes in the antagonist Issaky's breezy confidence, which is presented as irritating rather than satirized.
- Resolution withholding: 38 out of 100
- The novel appears to build toward emotional resolution around the store's fate and Ellis's relationships. The supernatural framing of the opening letter introduces ambiguity, but the overall narrative arc moves toward closure rather than deliberate open-endedness.
- Structural complexity: 30 out of 100
- A linear third-person close narrative following Ellis through a present-tense crisis, with one framing device—the dated letter from 1963 that opens the book. No significant timeline jumps, POV multiplicity, or formal experiments. The structure is straightforward contemporary literary fiction.
How Still here is regarded
Still here holds a literary regard score of 60 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.