Daniel Kraus is a prominent SFFH writer whom I hadn’t heard about until I found out that Skiffy and Fanty’s Daniel Haeusser had scored an interview with him for the show, coming live on Friday, June 12, at 8 p.m. Eastern, at https://twitch.tv/alphabetstreams. Shaun Duke and I are talking with Kraus mostly about his upcoming science fiction novel, The Sixth Nik. However, at about the same time, I saw that his 2025 novel, Angel Down, had won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and that became available to me first, so here are my immediate thoughts on it.
The basic plot is that a group of soldiers who were sent to find someone shrieking on the battlefield finds a downed (not necessarily fallen) angel instead. The Pulitzer award notification calls Angel Down “A breathless novel of World War I, a stylistic tour-de-force that blends such genres as allegory, magical realism and science fiction into a cohesive whole, told in a single sentence.”
Is it a tour-de-force? Absolutely! However, although there’s allegory, I wouldn’t call this science fiction. It fits the broadest definition of magical realism, detached from its Latin American roots, but the magical/miraculous events are definitely not treated matter-of-factly. I’d lean more toward calling it historical urban dark fantasy, even though it takes place in the trenches and no-man’s-land of World War I rather than in a city.
I’m even tempted to call it horror, because the first quarter of the book shows the terribleness of war in grim, graphic, tactile detail, and many more horrible things keep happening. I’ve read a fair amount of military history and period milfic, and Kraus is not exaggerating in his depictions, but this story is definitely not for the faint of heart or weak of stomach. (I was reminded of an excellent RPPR actual play Call of Cthulhu mini-campaign in which the players were considerably more horrified by the immersive real-life details about trench warfare than by the supernatural elements.)
The protagonist is PFC Cyril Bagger, a conman who dodges combat as much as possible, partly by seizing upon burial details for his fallen comrades. He doesn’t consider his fellow soldiers as buddies, though, just more potential marks. Except there’s one kid, Arno, who has attached himself to Bagger through persistence. Arno even nags Bagger into reading stories to him since he’s illiterate.
One thing that I really loved about Angel Down, which probably won’t appeal as strongly to many other readers, is that Arno and Bagger’s current reading journey is The Son of Tarzan (1915) by Edgar Rice Burroughs. My father had a tattered 1917 hardcover of that, with many excellent illustrations, so it’s close to my heart despite some problematic elements; I wrote a little about it on my own blog in a roundup of Burroughs’ female characters in 2020.
Bagger doesn’t care about Meriem or Jane, though; he focuses on the “conflict” between Tarzan and his son Jack (Korak the Killer). Certainly father-son conflicts are a real thing (as fetishized in postapocalyptic society in Suzy McKee Charnas’ Walk to the End of the World, which Skiffy and Fanty discussed in a 2024 podcast), but Bagger is projecting here. His relationship with his own father, a bishop, was quite confrontational, although he treasures his only inheritance from him, the family Bible, for the comforting childhood associations that its scents evoke in him.
Anyway, Arno, Bagger, and three other soldiers are sent over the top to “help” (rescue or dispatch) someone who can be heard screaming, loud and long, over the din of battle, somewhere in no-man’s-land between the American and German trenches. Popkin and Goodspeed get short shrift as characters, and Veck gets little at first, although he becomes better understood as the story progresses. Major General Reis, who sends out the little squad, is a caricature of a character, wholly obsessed with his own disability and potential glory rather than his men, seeing the war only as his opportunity for self-advancement.
That’s OK, though, because aside from musings about the nature of humanity and angels, this book is about Bagger’s personal journey. (Everything is told from his perspective, first tense except for flashbacks.) From grudgingly realizing that he cares about the kid, he comes to comprehend more about his fellow soldiers (mostly from how they see and treat the angel, and the miracles that are granted to them), and people in general. Although he mostly drifts with the momentum of events (and this novel is full of propulsive happenings), eventually, he is confronted with a choice that will drastically affect the future of humanity, according to the angel. Will he save one innocent, or will he choose the “greater good” instead?
Bagger starts out as a jerk, mostly sympathetic just due to the bad place in which readers find him, but he becomes more and more thoughtful and empathetic as the story progresses. Moreover, this novel has a lot to say, not just about him, but about humanity as seen through his eyes, his experiences, his thoughts and emotions, and his actions. It’s a great book, and I highly recommend it.
A note about the “breathless” style: Angel Down begins mid-sentence (the first word is “and”) and is technically all one sentence fragment after that, ending with a comma. Although there are occasional question marks and exclamation points, and it’s broken into paragraphs and even chapters, there are no sentence-ending periods, just comma after comma. However, I experienced this novel as an audiobook, and this stylistic choice can’t be discerned from the narration (well performed by Kirby Heyborne). If you want to experience the book as Kraus wrote it, you should probably get it in text form; however, I don’t think I missed much via the audiobook.
For more by Kraus, in addition to Angel Down and The Sixth Nik, there’s a movie coming out in October that’s based on Kraus’ 2023 novel, Whalefall. I’ll probably check that out in September, after I’ve finished my Hugo Awards reading. Other works include Rotters and Trollhunters (with Guillermo del Toro).
Angel Down, by Daniel Kraus, is available here.
Content warnings: War, lots of gore, murders, violence, refugees, greed, racism and discrimination against disability.
Disclaimer: None. I love libraries!
