The Darkness Outside Us by Eliot Schrefer
Published 2021 · 109,175 words · about 6 hours at an average pace · Science Fiction, Young Adult, LGBTQ+ Fiction
How hard is The Darkness Outside Us to read?
The Darkness Outside Us scores 31 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: 27 out of 100
- A young adult science-fiction thriller aimed at teen readers, it most likely uses clear contemporary vocabulary with some spaceflight terms. It sits near Beach Read and It Ends with Us in accessibility.
- Sentence structure: 27 out of 100
- Commercial YA suspense favors direct, readable sentences that keep the pace up. Its syntax resembles Beach Read more than anything denser.
- Abstraction: 33 out of 100
- A survival story on a rescue mission is grounded in concrete events and a tense relationship between two boys. It stays closer to It Ends with Us than to philosophical fiction.
- Information density: 33 out of 100
- At about 109,000 words, the plot-driven survival story relies on suspense and manageable reveals. It compares to The Housemaid in how it doles out information.
- Narrative indirection: 35 out of 100
- Reviewers describe a mystery with horror notes, so readers piece together what is going wrong aboard the ship. The telling is still mostly direct, like The Housemaid.
- Symbolic density: 25 out of 100
- Genre survival fiction with a romance at its center carries little allegorical weight. The space setting works mainly as isolation and tension, a light symbolic layer like Beach Read's.
- Ironic distance: 22 out of 100
- Reviews stress earnest suspense and emotional connection between the two boys. The tone is sincere, close to It Ends with Us.
- Resolution withholding: 42 out of 100
- It opens a series, so some threads likely carry into the sequel, The Brightness Between Us. Mystery and survival plots still tend to deliver answers within the volume.
- Structural complexity: 30 out of 100
- Nothing suggests radical formal experiment; it reads as a suspense narrative with mystery reveals. Its structure is likely linear with some twists, like Beach Read.
How The Darkness Outside Us is regarded
The Darkness Outside Us holds a literary regard score of 34 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.