chthonic

Pretty underground still, apparently.

See also autochthonous, heterochthonous.

It's been ages since I read that splendid novel, must do so again.

It doesn't seem particularly sensible to apply these readability indices to an individual sentence. Each involves an *average* sentence length, suggesting a lack of validity when the calculation is based on only one sentence.

actually brtom your citation doesn't say anything about up.

The second sentence of your quotation contains 70 words, giving it readability index scores of Flesch Reading Ease = 50.4, Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level of 12.0

I like the way Ralph Ellison in Invislbe Man adapts this word as the name of the building in which the narrator is introduced to The Brotherhood:

We stopped before an expensive-looking building in a strange part of the city. I could see the word Chthonian on the storm awning stretched above the walk as I got out with the others and went swiftly toward a lobby lighted by dim bulbs set behind frosted glass, going past the uniformed doorman with an uncanny sense of familiarity; feeling now, as we entered a sound-proof elevator and shot away at a mile a minute, that I had been through it all before.

Ellison, Invisible Man, 14

Funny how a mythical allusion works the mind, transforming the subsequent details into something altogether new - making an up-to-now hidden world out of details from the ordinary world. The character is being ushered into an "underground" by going up in an elevator.