The Thriller: A History by Michael Denning
Published 1987 · 82,000 words · about 7 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism
How hard is The Thriller: A History to read?
The Thriller: A History scores 58 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: 70 out of 100
- Marxist cultural theory vocabulary integrated into close reading requires familiarity with cultural studies discourse.
- Sentence structure: 65 out of 100
- Abstraction: 78 out of 100
- Ideological analysis operates at a high level of abstraction, with specific texts as evidence for structural claims.
- Information density: 80 out of 100
- Every chapter integrates historical context, theoretical argument, and textual analysis.
- Narrative indirection: 16 out of 100
- Arguments are stated with academic directness though theoretical framework requires patience.
- Symbolic density: 26 out of 100
- Narrative elements — the gentleman spy, the mole, the defector — are read as ideological symbols throughout.
- Ironic distance: 18 out of 100
- Denning maintains ironic distance from the ideological positions the texts naturalise.
- Resolution withholding: 12 out of 100
- Arguments are stated and defended without deliberate ambiguity.
- Structural complexity: 42 out of 100
- Historical-analytical structure moves through decades while threading a consistent theoretical argument.
How The Thriller: A History is regarded
The Thriller: A History holds a literary regard score of 80 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.