Angel Down

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The critically acclaimed author of the “crazily enjoyable” (The New York Times) Whalefall returns with an immersive, cinematic novel about five World War I soldiers who stumble upon a fallen angel that could hold the key to ending the war.

Private Cyril Bagger has managed to survive the unspeakable horrors of the Great War through his wits and deception, swindling fellow soldiers at every opportunity. But his survival instincts are put to the ultimate test when he and four other grunts are given a deadly venture into the perilous No Man’s Land to euthanize a wounded comrade.

What they find amid the ruined battlefield, however, is not a man in need of mercy but a fallen angel, seemingly struck show more down by artillery fire. This celestial being may hold the key to ending the brutal conflict, but only if the soldiers can suppress their individual desires and work together. As jealousy, greed, and paranoia take hold, the group is torn apart by their inner demons, threatening to turn their angelic encounter into a descent into hell.

Angel Down plunges you into the heart of World War I and weaves a polyphonic tale of survival, supernatural wonder, and moral conflict.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I learned early in life that humans are vile, irredeemable homunculi, ruled by hatred, greed, and envy. Church was a solid training ground, thank you Jesus. So the story of the men in this tale wasn't a revelation or a surprise, nor an insulting calumny on humankind. It merely felt like I was hearing from a cheerier, more forgiving soul-sibling of mine.

Did anyone I know read Ducks, Newburyport? That hugely long sentence has a smaller sibling now in Kraus's latest, weird-stop-full-out toccata for literary pipe organ. It's about greed and hate and jealous loathing and fear...it's about humans trying to cope with transcendent realities while in the mire of fantastical pestilential mud. It's what your soul wants and your body resists while you can't even see a yard ahead because you need not to be slaughtered.

Unlike Lucy Ellmann's genius work of transcendence in the quotidian...I'm too intimidated to review it, there's just too much in there I want to read aloud to you!...this sentence is more compressible. It feels like Author Kraus did what Warhol did in Empire...turned on the camera after framing the shot then went away...but the point of this story is not to watch as time passes but watch as feelings, desires, emotions pass. It's a Zen in-joke. It's the kind of technique that some bounce off hard. It's meant to enable you as reader to get inside a flow of experiences of reality without ever feeling you are limited to just one. White space is your resting point; the absence of periods/full stops is your clue to the emotional reality of the Great War these people are utterly mired in, consumed by, entrapped entombed enmeshed inside.

The experiences are all, mental emotional psychical transcendent one and all, all of them are brutal and honest and unsentimentally crudely Earthy. In the midst of a grinding torturous killing machine with no end to the horror pain cruelty waste dehumanization, how else could they be? An angel from God in Her Heaven wounded and suffering? A divine being in need? A war experience that encompasses this! An actual angel laid low and so accessible to the traumatized men in need of a miracle....

So now, this being the case, what do these men do? Why do they hesitate or even reject doing the "obvious" and stopping the War? but a nagging voice insists it’s a miracle, which only pisses him off, he’ll be goddamned if he’s going to start believing in miracles here in hell

Bagger is our PoV. He is not one bit better than he is forced to be. He is canny, savvy to the ways of the world; he has a limited intellect, and if he has a soul, I saw no evidence of it. Arno, his foil, is Lumpenproletariat on legs, though more redeemable in my eyes than Bagger.

So how to explain my four and a half stars, when everything I've said either points all the way up or all the way down? I'm missing one key thing to make it the holotype war-fantasy story to rule them all: Why? Within the story, the why? never comes. I understand it's deliberate, it's a choice not a lapse. I still think a "why"...why Bagger, why now, why angel not demon...anchors a story set in a brutally real setting better than a lingering question does.

Gore, wickedness, horror, and all, it's one of my favorite reads of 2025. show less

In “Angel Down,” Daniel Kraus delivers a surreal and deeply unsettling anti-war novel that combines lyrical prose with scenes of almost unbearable brutality. The result is a fever dream of trench warfare in which mud, blood, greed, and superstition merge into something mythic and grotesque. Kraus creates a world where humanity appears trapped in an endless cycle of violence, unable—or unwilling—to escape its own appetite for destruction.

The protagonist, Bagger, is an especially compelling creation. He is the son of a bishop lost in the sinking of the Lusitania. Yet Bagger has rejected his father’s religion and all forms of altruism. Before the war, he survived by cheating at cards and exploiting others. Once drafted, he show more continues to evade danger whenever possible. Bagger initially seems almost irredeemable. He is selfish, cynical, and emotionally hollow. Yet Kraus wisely avoids making him a cartoonish figure. Beneath the greed and cowardice lies a damaged man whose moral instincts have not been entirely extinguished.

The novel’s central episode begins with a bizarre mission ordered by a power-hungry, physically damaged, and possibly insane general. Bagger and four other soldiers are ordered into no man’s land to silence a wounded man crying for help. Even this grim task becomes corrupted when the men decide who must go using a rigged game of rock, paper, scissors. Bagger cheats, naturally, but unexpectedly chooses to accompany the innocent young loser. That small act of reluctant decency becomes the hinge upon which the novel turns.

What they discover in the barbed wire is not a wounded soldier, but a fallen angel. From that moment forward, the novel abandons realism and plunges fully into hallucination and allegory. The angel becomes an object of obsession. The soldiers and general alike project onto her their desires for power, love, family, transcendence, or salvation. She appears capable of granting their wishes, yet every gift demands a terrible price, usually measured in suffering and death.

The imagery throughout the novel is extraordinary. Kraus writes with a lyrical intensity that often contrasts sharply with the horror he depicts. His trench warfare scenes are revolting in their physical detail, yet they possess a strange poetic beauty. Decaying body parts are everywhere, mud drowns men, and violence becomes almost overwhelming. The language itself reflects the chaos surrounding the characters, contributing to an increasingly dreamlike atmosphere.

At times, the novel’s hallucinatory structure threatens to overwhelm its meaning. As the plot grows stranger and more chaotic, the symbolism of the angel becomes elusive. She seems to represent many things simultaneously—faith, temptation, hope, war, human desire, even technological destruction. Because Kraus resists reducing her to a single interpretation, readers searching for a clear allegorical message may find the novel frustratingly opaque. Yet that uncertainty may be precisely Kraus’s point. War is chaotic. It destroys coherence, morality, and certainty. In this case, humanity cannot even encounter the divine without immediately seeking to possess, exploit, or weaponize it. Ultimately, Kraus suggests that killing not only persisted throughout history but has evolved to become easier, more technological, but more spiritually empty. This vision of humanity seems profoundly grim.

Still, Kraus leaves behind a faint glimmer of ambiguity. The angel’s fascination with Bagger’s unexpected moment of selflessness hints that even within a ruined soul, the capacity for compassion survives. That possibility never becomes sentimental or redemptive, but it prevents the novel from collapsing entirely into nihilism. The ending leaves the reader suspended between despair and hope, uncertain whether humanity is doomed to endless violence or merely unable to imagine another path. The final words are: “and, and, and…” echoing a level of uncertainty that leaves one questioning the future of humanity.

This is not an easy novel to interpret or endure. Its grotesque imagery, surreal narrative turns, and relentless darkness make it deeply unsettling. But it is also daring, imaginative, and hauntingly original. It is a novel interested in exposing the spiritual corruption that violence unleashes within the human soul. show less

Tragic events elbow a scheming draft dodger onto WWI’s carcass filled killing grounds where he drags his sorry ass over mud, blood and mutilated body parts to euthanize a screaming, suffering, squaddie, and upon reaching the wretched soul, finds instead, an injured angel exuding an intense beam of light which, ominously, guides the aim of Kraut cannon-shot toward her, and all of this tale is told with one never-ending sentence, no periods, none, but a million craved commas allow one to catch a breath. Have to say, I recommend this one.

In Angel Down, Cyril Bagger, a WWI doughboy on a grave-digging detail, finds a winged woman wounded and trapped in the barbed wire. He and his squad carry her across the battle-scarred no man’s land with the notion that if they can get her to headquarters, the brass will figure out how she can help them win the war. She is not a greeting-card angel, and she may even be an instrument of vengeance.

Daniel Kraus is not shy about his literary ambitions. The book begins in the middle of a sentence that does not end until the page. For all that, it is as accessible as a Hemingway novel. Here is a taste from the opening passage:
“and Cyril Bagger considers himself lucky, he ought to be topped off, gone west, bumped, clicked it, pushing show more daisies, a new landowner, napooed, just plain dead, not only dead but scattered around in globs, for the last thing he saw was a shell dropping on top of him with the noise of colliding freight trains, a jim-dandy of a shot from Fritzy the Hun, and kind of ironic, seeing how the whole reason Bagger prefers burial duty is artillery shells can’t reach this far” show less

I was not emotionally prepared for Daniel Kraus’ 2025 book, Angel Down. I can’t remember what drove me to pick it up in the first place, although it lives firmly within my wheelhouse. Man’s inhumanity to man? Check. The utter indifference of heaven? Check. Biblical allusions that don’t turn out like what you’ve been led to believe. Oh, yea.



Had I looked up Kraus’ CV before jumping in, I would have noticed his bona fides as a past collaborator with such masters of the filmic horror genre no less than George A. Romero and Guillermo del Toro. Even so, I should have been tipped off by the cover blurb by one of my favorite authors of this decade, Stephen Graham Jones.

There is a scene in Jones’ The Only Good Indian that show more still haunts me five years after I read it. Perhaps the saving grace of the depth of real horror that Kraus serves up from the trenches of the Western Front is that the senses become so overwhelmed that nothing sticks. In the immortal words of Johnny Cash, speaking on yet another war, Drive on, it don’t mean nothin’. Can you become shell-shocked from a novel?

My favorite stories all have a memorable anti-hero, this book has five… well, four and a total innocent that is unfairly lumped in with the rest. These doughboys are saddled with a suicide mission precisely due to their expendability. Their vainglorious commanding officer, the only character that rings a little hollow, sends the mismatched quintet out to the middle of No Man’s Land as the division retreats as a way to rid himself of them all in one fell swoop.

The relentless style that Kraus employs, as if the entire book were one run-on sentence, propels the reader headlong through the narrative, as if you, too, were scrambling over the broken pieces of men and machines in a desperate bid to save… oneself? A wayward angel? All of mankind? In the end, the effect is one of exhausted fatalism. “Them that die’ll be the lucky ones,” as Robert Louis Stevenson’s Long John Silver famously stated.

Krause is capable of dark flights of poetic abstraction as well, as best shown when our final anti-hero is driven into the center of the Earth, to Hell itself, in a peek behind the curtain that rivals the mechanical dread of Ken Kesey’s Combine, the machine behind the scene in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. show less

The format of this book is something completely different from anything I have ever read. I was definitely skeptical at first as to whether or not I would like it, but I ended up really enjoying it. It was so unique the way only commas were used at the end of each paragraph--no periods whatsoever--and if not done correctly, this book could have been horribly written. However, the way the author lays it out, it worked so well! I can see a lot of people not liking it as much as I did, or at all, but I found it so well-done that I couldn't help but thoroughly enjoy it, and after a while, you get so used to the odd punctuation that it doesn't bother you.

I liked the main character a lot. I liked his relationship with a few of the side show more characters–both his dislike and like for them–especially the young character Arno. The main character's quips and wit made me laugh and made me like him even more. He was charismatic and intelligent, and was surviving both the war and himself--mainly his own demons.

The war was covered in gory and vulgar detail, but that's war. It was incredibly vivid, and if you have a weak stomach, I don’t know how you can get around reading this book since there’s really no warning when something cruel or disgusting is about to happen. That did not deter me from reading it, though, and I found that, in some cases, this made it even more realistic.

I was on the fence–and still am–about the character of the angel and the situations involving her. She was vital to the story, yet I felt like she could’ve been used in different and better ways. I liked the idea of her appearance, and the scene of how they discovered her was incredible. However, parts were unclear at times with her and what she was or what she was doing there.

As for the ending, it did feel a little rushed and a bit odd at times. I think it could have been wrapped up a little better. But overall, this book really took me for a ride and I would easily recommend it to others.

I received this book from Netgalley to give my honest opinion and review. show less

I had an idea that I would like this book from the very beginning. The book comes at you like a run-on sentence, which has the tendency to raise your anxiety a bit. The audiobook was excellently read. 5 doughboys out of 5 doughboys.