During the First World War, 5 American soldiers are tasked with crawling through the no-man’s land between trenches in France to rescue a wounded comrade. But what they find isn’t another soldier; it’s an angel, fallen from the skies.
Or is it?
What follows is what critics like to call a “tour-de-force” and it’s a real blockbuster, the kind of fantastical, phantasmagoric (with an emphasis on gore), cinematic, headlong story that, in my opinion, constitutes a consequential artistic achievement deserving of many laudits, including, believe it or not, the 2026 Pulitzer Prize in fiction.
I’m a fan of when artists take big swings, and Daniel Kraus has hit a dinger with this book. It’s got everything: war, religion (including all the cardinal sins), love, existential angst, race, more than a little gallows humor, some satire — all told in a unique way.
Kraus has written Angel Down as a single, book-length sentence.
Sure, it’s a run-on sentence. But that lends the narrative a kind of breathless energy that made this reader thankful for chapter breaks. And Kraus also manages to shift the narrative viewpoint wildly from one character to another (often within a given scene), all without losing narrative focus. There are no slow stretches, no dull sequences in this book.
And the ending? Well, it’s a doozy.
I highly recommend it.
Get Angel Down by Daniel Kraus here: https://a.co/d/0jdOjZqS
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