ANGEL DOWN is hands-down my favorite WWI novel

ANGEL DOWN
DANIEL KRAUS
Atria Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

A New York Times 10 Best Books of 2025 selection!

Rating: 4.5* of five

A New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2025 selection

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 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.