The Sluts by Dennis Cooper
Published 2004 · 82,500 words · about 7 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, LGBTQ+ Fiction
How hard is The Sluts to read?
The Sluts scores 64 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: 45 out of 100
- Deliberately crude message-board vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 42 out of 100
- Short, ungrammatical posts.
- Abstraction: 45 out of 100
- Concrete, brutally so.
- Information density: 55 out of 100
- Moderate, but the contradictions multiply.
- Narrative indirection: 88 out of 100
- Anonymous reviewers who contradict each other and may all be lying or the same person.
- Symbolic density: 45 out of 100
- Little; the flatness is the horror.
- Ironic distance: 62 out of 100
- The gap between the posts and any reality is the whole book.
- Resolution withholding: 82 out of 100
- What actually happened is never established.
- Structural complexity: 78 out of 100
- Entirely message-board posts, reviews and emails.
How The Sluts is regarded
The Sluts holds a literary regard score of 44 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.