The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All by Laird Barron
Published 2013 · 280 pages · 80,000 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Horror, Short Fiction
How hard is The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All to read?
The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All scores 53 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: 58 out of 100
- Rich, literary vocabulary. Barron draws on natural history, espionage terminology, and archaic diction. His prose demands attention and rewards it.
- Sentence structure: 55 out of 100
- Abstraction: 55 out of 100
- Cosmic horror concepts woven through concrete, physical narratives. Barron grounds the abstract in wilderness settings and bodily experience.
- Information density: 58 out of 100
- Dense with atmosphere, mythology, and precise natural description. Barron's stories reward multiple readings as mythological connections emerge.
- Narrative indirection: 55 out of 100
- Barron withholds revelations and layers mystery. Stories often begin with characters already embedded in situations whose true nature emerges gradually.
- Symbolic density: 60 out of 100
- Forests, caves, darkness, and predation function within Barron's mythological system. Natural settings carry cosmic symbolic weight.
- Ironic distance: 35 out of 100
- Barron's tough-guy narrators sometimes display self-aware irony, but the cosmic horror is played straight. No postmodern winking.
- Resolution withholding: 60 out of 100
- Stories end with partial revelations—characters glimpse the truth but rarely survive to articulate it. The mythos remains largely unexplained.
- Structural complexity: 45 out of 100
- Varied structures including nested narratives and non-chronological storytelling. The collection's internal mythology adds structural depth.
How The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All is regarded
The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All holds a literary regard score of 53 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.