Ok, to start and end here’s my only comments about this novel’s structure. Angel Down is written in one sentence, and with every paragraph separated by white space on the page and every paragraph beginning with “and” which then goes on for nearly 300 pages. Not my cup of tea. As a writer Kraus might say to the one-sentence crowd, ‘I’ll see your sentence and raise you an ‘and.’”
But hang on. This is definitely a stunner and worthy of its Pulitzer Prize.
Kraus’s narrative is often poetic, sophisticated, lyrical, complicated, high-brow, and at the same time horrific. The horror of war (World War I) is front and center and he pulls no punches. For this reason, not everyone will want to read this 2026 Pulitzer Prize novel. It’s definitely harsh and specializes in the most earthy descriptions of brains spattering in soldiers’ faces, arms, legs, organs lying around and how the soldiers have a dinner of rats when things get tough, and the total destitution of the civilians (mouse tail sticking out between an old man’s teeth) that makes war everyone’s domain.
The main character, Cyril Bagger, is on grave detail near the front-line trenches. He’s spent his life as a grifter and hopes to return to that life after the war assuming he’s still alive. He and four other soldiers are left behind to go out to no man’s land and ‘help’ a wounded soldier who turns out to be a for-real angel, one that might hold the answer to halting war forever. Think that’s where its depth ends? Well, there’s so much more: morality, ethics, religion, human nature, all pile on throughout the novel. And it remains graphic whether describing the ugly trenches of war or the hope of another world that is beautiful. A paradoxical use of graphic language. But he mostly stays on the horrific side of the ledger. He also doesn’t seem (at least in this fictional novel) to have faith in humanity overall, but interestingly, does find a good man in the deceitful Bagger, who has no idea that he’s good.
The prose are relentless and as creative as anything I’ve read lately with $5 words mixed into the ugliness he describes as body parts appear. A high-end vocabulary made me feel I was sophisticated, yet there are some descriptions so ugly that I wouldn’t read them again.
The New York Times book review spends a lot of time on the ‘additive’ nature of the narrative where one thought is added to another and so on, whether there’s a connection between them or not. And this style keeps you reading as fast as you can. It’s been a long time since I’ve read a book I wished would end but then as it did start to end, I wished it wouldn’t.
While the use of “and” to start each paragraph begins to make sense as one reads, the ending has 3 pages of nothing but “and” repeated in a new line, line after line, and finally with a resolution (of sorts) for Bagger. That series of ‘ands’ seems to reduce, lessen, maybe even cheapen, the rest of the novel IMHO. But my final word is that this book is a totally relentless, unforgiving, honest (even if there’s an angel,) and a masterful example of how to lock-in a reader while risking pushing the reader away at the same time. As Angel Down is so very affecting, one has to wonder at Kraus’s state of mind as he wrote – maybe a bit of insanity? But it worked to create something very new, innovative, unique and just plain different, yet keeping a literary depth any writer could envy. Innovative additive speculative fiction all wrapped in a beautiful coat of horror.
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