You know that opening bell followed by the words "And they're off!" to start a horse race? Well, that would be a perfect way to begin reading Angel Down by Daniel Kraus, the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winner. Ron Winters, writing for the NYT, described the work as "a thunderous gallop of a novel, starting off midsentence and mid-battle." That galloping pace doesn't let up for the whole race book. It goes on and on, one sentence in "285 dizzying, blood-soaked, astonishing pages." Yes, you read that right. One sentence. As the family grammarian, my husband observes that even though Kraus doesn't use periods, you can't really call this one sentence.
Daniel Kraus typically writes horror novels. He swerved into historical fiction in Angel Down to write a WWI novel, albeit one filled with horror -- the man-made horror of war. In the first half sentence of the novel, Pvt. Cyril Bagger wakes up from a near-death experience in a field littered with the bodies and body parts of his fellow soldiers. The most terrifying scream ever heard by anyone arises in the midst of all the carnage. Before his commanding officer leaves the area with the rest of his unit, Bagger and four other soldiers are ordered to find and euthanize the fallen comrade in obvious misery. The team is forced to go into No Man's Land to find the screamer. What they find is not a wounded soldier but a fallen angel, one of God's best, tangled in barb wire, emitting the mournful wail. For the rest of the novel Pvt. Bagger tries to defend the angel, guarding her from the threats of battle zones and other soldiers, now turned predators. His goal is to deliver her to safety. But where is that exactly?
Cutting through the rot and horror, like a system of trenches. is a savage satire of war, reminiscent of Catch-22 and Dr. Strangelove. Kraus’s most indelible creation in this vein is the sneering Major General Reis, so desperate for a Medal of Honor that he’d single-handedly prolong the war until he gets one (Winters).
The angel is prepared to perform miracles, she is all-powerful after all, and to provide the soldiers what they desire. But are their desires what they really need? Each soldier in the rescue squad succumbs to one of the deadly sins trying to exploit the angel and her powers, except Bagger who above all wants to deliver her to safety -- the only selfless act. The angel seems to hold the key to ending the war, but none of the mortals can get their act together to make that happen. Kraus resisted the temptation to rely on the usual angel tropes of easy redemption and he also avoided reciting any syrupy moral lessons. Instead, readers are left to figure out for themselves what the angel might represent and what one should think about the morality of war.
Don and I listened to the audiobook of Angel Down on a recent road trip, so we weren't always aware of the whole "book-in-one-sentence" thing. Don commented at some point how every transition started with the word "and" which makes sense but it was irritating in the predictable repetition. However, we weren't aware at the time that the opening begins mid-sentence and the book ends with a comma -- which implies there is no end to war and turmoil. We were very conscious of the galloping pace. Don wondered if the narrator was reading at breakneck speed on purpose and we decided it was intentional. Narrators will usually drop their voices at the end of every sentence when reading aloud. Since there was not a period in sight, the narrator could never drop his voice. The technique was both disconcerting and thrilling at the same time, creating the sense of frenzy and urgency of a war zone.
And then there was the stunning conclusion. Stunning. I'm still rendered speechless weeks after finishing the book.
Don and I were both prepared to not like the book, this being a(n anti-) war novel with a steady dose of blood and guts, but we both ended up liking it a lot. We had good discussions about the imagery and moral dilemmas presented and we thought the author made brilliant points about the inanity of war. 5 stars from both.
-Anne
