Excerpt from Angel Down by Daniel Kraus, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

and it's only through the motions of inhaling that Bagger feels a brittle tightness, his face is glazed in dried blood, clearly not his own, and he orders himself not to imagine whose, it's best when blood has no deeper meaning than rain, especially in the Argonne where so few trees remain to block the October wind that flash-dries blood so rapidly to your skin,

and while there's no telling which boy bled this blood, what kind of blood is a different matter, fourteen days into this cyclone of cartilage and lead, Bagger has developed a sommelier palate for the tart fizz of brachial blood, the fudgy sorghum of femoral, the meaty sludge of heart wounds, the rancid reek of any gut juice at all, and the warm salt lick of arterial blood he now licks from his lips,

and it's good the Bible is here to push him through it, Bagger takes a loud, greedy sniff, sinuses bathed in the aromatic nostalgia of comfort and solace, then reluctantly pockets the book and sticks fingers into his ear holes to clear out the creamy plugs of mud and blood, in this trenchworld hearing is so much more vital than seeing,

and the world's noises whoosh back, and Bagger catches his breath at a rubbery wail that overrides everything, another minenwerfer dropping, the same kind of shell that ripped his fellow buriers to cutlets, oh no, oh shit, but hold on, wait, no, this is different, less a wail than a shriek, no rival to a minnie on a decibel level but with an edge that chisels through the end-times grumble at a pitch he's never heard,

and though there's plenty of attack machines in extremis out in No Man's Land, their death moans are as predictable as hinges, while this shriek is organic, as alive as Marie-Louise's pleased moans or Bishop Bagger's stentorian damnations, it could be male or female, human or animal, but whatever it is, it's dying, dying slow, dying loud, ripple after glissading ripple of agonized lament,

and Bagger, already weighed down in mud and blood, further heavies in the dreary certainty that the shriek won't ever end, just like the war 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 to form a terrible black wheel that, sooner or later, will drag each and every person to their grave,

Excerpted from Angel Down by Daniel Kraus. Copyright © 2025 by Daniel Kraus. Excerpted by permission of Atria Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.