The Darkness That Comes Before by R. Scott Bakker
Published 2003 · 180,000 words · about 12 hours at an average pace · Fantasy, Philosophy
How hard is The Darkness That Comes Before to read?
The Darkness That Comes Before 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: 65 out of 100
- Dense philosophical vocabulary alongside invented terminology. Bakker writes like a philosophy PhD—because he is one.
- Sentence structure: 60 out of 100
- Long, complex sentences. Academic prose rhythms infiltrate the fantasy narrative. Dense paragraphs.
- Abstraction: 72 out of 100
- Consciousness, free will, the nature of belief, cognitive manipulation. The novel is a philosophical argument in narrative form.
- Information density: 60 out of 100
- Dense world-building, political factions, philosophical framework, and two thousand years of in-world history.
- Narrative indirection: 50 out of 100
- Multiple POV characters, some of whom are being manipulated without knowing it. The reader must work to distinguish truth from performance.
- Symbolic density: 55 out of 100
- The Holy War as collective delusion. Kellhus as the Nietzschean Übermensch. The Consult as existential threat made real.
- Ironic distance: 45 out of 100
- Bakker maintains intellectual distance from all positions. The narrative treats faith, reason, and manipulation with equal scrutiny.
- Resolution withholding: 55 out of 100
- First of a trilogy (and a larger series). The Holy War barely begins. Kellhus's true nature remains ambiguous.
- Structural complexity: 50 out of 100
- Multiple POV characters, philosophical interludes, and a complex political/military narrative across thousands of miles.
How The Darkness That Comes Before is regarded
The Darkness That Comes Before holds a literary regard score of 56 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.