Review of Angel Down by Daniel Kraus

Every once and a while, out of the blue, brushing your teeth for example, lightning strikes. Every once and a while you're going to work, same path you always take, and an elephant falls from the sky. And every once and a while, traveling the well-trodden highways and byways of contemporary fiction, a truly exceptional book plops in front of your eyeballs. This review is lightning; Daniel Kraus' Angel Down (2025) is the blue.

Angel Down is the story of Bagger, a gravedigger deployed to an American company of soldiers at the front-lines of Bois de Caures in World War I, France. The front-lines provide Bagger no shortage of work, and a cynical view of his fellow soldiers to boot. No use getting close to people when you'll bury them the next day. Bagger hopes to survive the war in order to return to his Iowa farm. But a chance encounter with an angel one battle changes his fate.

But that is just the story of Angel Down. Just.

I know, I know. A great many people, perhaps even the majority of readers, come to fiction for story, for plot, for things happening. But as you see, the story of Angel Down is nothing that slaps the would-be reader in the face and says READ ME. It's style which earns the book a place in the pantheon of great 21st century novels.

Angel Down is electric. Actually, it's surrealism. But the voice carrying the book, page after page, relentlessly dynamic, is electric—electrifying, even. It's flashes of horror and visceral violence and ethereal explosions and wastelands of French farmland and streaking artillery and the tang of mustard gas and... Exactly, “and”.

Angel Down is written in unorthodox fashion. I would say “experimental”, but Kraus is in control from word one. Paragraphs are intentionally run-on sentences, no capitalization, each beginning with the word “and”. It puts the reader in situ, and...

What follows “and” is pure vigor. Angel Down is chock full of evocation, words that generate pyrotechnics. Battle, emotions, fever dreams, nightmares, fear, bravery, and brutal experience spatter the reader's mental screen. Rather than a realist representation of WWI, Krause paints with a poetic brush, a jagged razor in reality, that renders scenes—the trenches, firefights, artillery fire, the throes of hallucination—in un-real fashion. I searched for a better word than 'un-real', but none fit as good. It's clear Kraus wanted to create a livid mental world through livid fantastical language and scene-crafting. It's un-real.

What needs to be made clear: the prose is not purple. Kraus doesn't squeeze the life out his thesaurus just because he can. Like Frida or Ernst, Dali or Varos, Kraus creates layers of narrative meaning that extend beyond the reality of the subject matter through artistic expression. The feeling imposed by the onslaught of syntax is as important as its meaning.

In the end, Angel Down is a phenomenal piece of fiction. That being a qualitative statement, it's important to note that, for this reviewer writing is foremost an art, secondly storytelling. Kraus uses words not for the purpose of describing a series of engaging events, rather to paint a series of engaging events—to color, influence, present them in a particular fashion through a specific lens. It's WWI with the energy of a thunderstorm cut loose on the human soul in violent, visual, surreal fashion. It will char your eyes, but you will want more—to uncover the morality, the condition, the state of being Kraus is aiming at in the men he portrays. But I digress. I want to gush more but am wary I've liked gushed too much. Go get struck by lightning.