The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
Published 1902 · 58,786 words · about 4 hours at an average pace · Horror, Mystery & Crime
How hard is The Hound of the Baskervilles to read?
The Hound of the Baskervilles scores 38 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: 38 out of 100
- Doyle writes clean Victorian prose. Some period language and Dartmoor geography require attention. The vocabulary is accessible; the pleasure is in plotting.
- Sentence structure: 40 out of 100
- Well-made sentences of moderate length. Doyle's style is efficient, serving mystery and atmosphere. No syntactic challenges.
- Abstraction: 32 out of 100
- Concrete detection and Gothic setting. Themes about reason versus superstition operate in background. The novel is entertainment first.
- Information density: 45 out of 100
- Clues, suspects, and moor geography require tracking. The plot is intricate but manageable. You're meant to play along with the detection.
- Narrative indirection: 42 out of 100
- Watson narrates; Holmes conceals. The misdirection is genre-appropriate. You're shown what Watson sees; you must deduce what Holmes deduces.
- Symbolic density: 45 out of 100
- The hound as ancestral curse, the moor as primordial chaos—Gothic symbols do their work. Doyle deploys conventions skillfully without deep originality.
- Ironic distance: 35 out of 100
- Holmes's superiority provides gentle irony. The Gothic atmosphere is played straight. Doyle entertains rather than subverts.
- Resolution withholding: 25 out of 100
- The mystery resolves completely. Holmes explains everything. Genre expectations are satisfied. No loose ends.
- Structural complexity: 38 out of 100
- Linear narrative with Watson's investigation preceding Holmes's revelation. The structure is classical mystery: problem, investigation, solution.
How The Hound of the Baskervilles is regarded
The Hound of the Baskervilles holds a literary regard score of 83 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.