A horror novel has won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for the first time since Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road took the honor in 2007. This is huge for both the horror genre and its fans: It’s rare to see horror stories win prestigious literary prizes, outside The Bram Stoker Awards.
Other books that won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction have included horrific elements. Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys was inspired by the long history of the systematic murder of Black boys at Florida’s Dozier School, and Toni Morrison’s Beloved is an intense examination of the legacy of slavery. But you won’t find those books shelved in the horror section at your local bookstore. Kraus’s Angel Down, however, legitimately could be.
Set during World War I, Angel Down tells the story of Private Cyril Bagger, a hustler and a con man who gets by in the trenches by swindling his fellow soldiers out of their few possessions. Cyril’s instincts and his sense of self-preservation are put to the test when he and four other soldiers (including a 14-year-old boy who has ingratiated himself with Bagger) are tasked with wading into No Man’s Land to put a wounded comrade out of his misery. Instead of a dying soldier, they find a fallen angel who appears to have been struck down by artillery fire.
Anger, jealousy, greed, paranoia, and even lust threaten to tear the group apart as they are forced to work together to return the angel to their commanding officer in an effort to stop the war once and for all.
Written as one breathless, bloody, beautiful sentence, Angel Down is as miraculous as the angel that Cyril and his fellow soldiers find caught in barbed wire. This is not a story for the faint of heart, or an easy book to read by any stretch of the imagination. Angel Down is a perfectly balanced combination of the actual horror of World War I and fictional horror, of both the cosmic and Old Testament variety — this book contains an abundance of wheels and eyes.
Angel Down is relentlessly violent. Bagger gets covered in chunks of other people multiple times. Untreated STDs and trench foot are described in gag-worthy detail. And one character has such a severe breakdown that he starts to wear a rotten horse head over his own head. All of this is magnified by that single-sentence conceit, a point Kraus hammers home by telling readers early on: “just like the war that won’t ever end, like the carnage won’t ever end, it’s a sentence in a book careening without periods, gasping with too many commas, a sentence that, once begun, can’t ever be stopped, a sentence doomed to loop back on itself.”
Aside from the book's violence, Bagger and his compatriots aren’t good people. It’s difficult to find someone to actually root for when it’s made clear early on that there are no real heroes in their Suicide Squad-esque task force, only men who Uncle Sam has reduced to the worst versions of themselves. Still, Bagger winds up as the group’s moral compass as they make their way back to the trenches, a glowing, beatific, deeply unsettling angel in tow.
Despite its brutality, Angel Down is undeniably beautiful. Kraus conjures breathtaking imagery so effortlessly that the novel reads more like a very long poem than a 300-page novel. It’s impossible to tear your eyes away from Angel Down, and the writing style is a clever way to lure in horror-averse readers who usually stick to more mainstream literary works — for instance, the Pulitzer Prize Board.