Scary Monsters by Michelle de Kretser
Published 2022 · 70,357 words · about 6 hours at an average pace
How hard is Scary Monsters to read?
Scary Monsters scores 57 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: 52 out of 100
- De Kretser weaves French phrases throughout without translation — harkis, fin de mois difficile, le centre historique, flick-flick — and the prose draws on a wide cultural vocabulary of names and allusions (Berger, de Beauvoir, Barthes, Althusser, Goya). The language is sophisticated but never obscure; readers may encounter unfamiliar French terms yet context and tone carry the meaning. Closer to The Great Gatsby than to Moby-Dick in lexical demand.
- Sentence structure: 48 out of 100
- Sentences are controlled and varied — medium-length with embedded clauses and parenthetical asides, but not Jamesian in their nesting. De Kretser favours clean declarative rhythms punctuated by deft aphoristic turns ('I valued my life at something less than a few francs'). The syntax rewards attention but never obstructs comprehension.
- Abstraction: 60 out of 100
- The novel is grounded in the concrete specifics of Montpellier 1980–81, but every scene carries ideological weight: the flea-market police check becomes a meditation on racisme, the staffroom lunch over steak frites becomes a collision between existentialism and solidarity. Abstract questions about who 'has history' and who only 'has lives' arise directly from observed incident rather than philosophical digression.
- Information density: 65 out of 100
- Every page loads cultural freight: the Yorkshire Ripper, the Althusser murder, the Spanish Civil War, the Sétif massacre, the Algerian war, Goya's Third of May, de Beauvoir's Marseille hikes, John Berger's Ways of Seeing. Readers who carry this context will find layered resonances; those without it will follow the surface story but miss significant dimensions. Denser than Normal People, lighter than 2666.
- Narrative indirection: 62 out of 100
- Adult Lili narrates with retrospective clarity, explicitly noting what she failed to see at the time — the class gap with Minna, the racial dynamics with Jamal, the cost of her own fear. But much is left structurally implied: the precise nature of the threat from Rinaldi, the weight of her family's immigrant dread, the erotic charge between her and Nick. Readers must assemble what the narrator does not quite say.
- Symbolic density: 55 out of 100
- The Bowie song that gives the novel its title (and the Thin White Duke's admiration for Hitler) threads through the text as a resonant motif linking fascism, fear, and pop culture. Daring Audrey's prop gun, the spiral staircase built over a possible corpse, Candlewoman's Fresh from the Tomb appearance — these accrue symbolic charge without the novel ever becoming allegory. The symbolism is local and suggestive rather than systematic.
- Ironic distance: 62 out of 100
- The retrospective narration is shot through with self-irony: Lili catches herself performing Bold Intelligent Woman, calculates the racial arithmetic of gift-giving, and records her own cowardice with unflinching precision. The novel also deploys sustained satirical irony in the Gaston-et-Clothilde routines and the staffroom exchanges, where high-minded French discourse papers over colonial violence. Readers must read against the narrator's younger self as well as against the social pieties she lampoons.
- Resolution withholding: 68 out of 100
- The Rinaldi threat dissolves without explanation or confrontation; the question of Lili's feelings for Nick is neither acted on nor resolved; her friendship with Minna ends in an unfinished ellipsis rather than a rupture. The novel resists closure on its central preoccupations — who belongs, who is safe, what counts enough — leaving these explicitly open. Closer to Lolita's deliberate withholding than to the genre HEA.
- Structural complexity: 42 out of 100
- The novel uses a single retrospective first-person narrator recalling one year in Montpellier. The structure is roughly chronological, moving through seasonal time from September 1980 to the April ferry trip to Sardinia. No fragmentation, multiple POVs, or formal experiment — the complexity is in the voice and the layering of irony, not in structural innovation. Comparable to The Great Gatsby in its clean retrospective frame.
How Scary Monsters is regarded
Scary Monsters holds a literary regard score of 50 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.