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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 mission: 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.
Chapter I
I
and Cyril Bagger considers himself lucky, he ought to be topped off, gone west, bumped, clicked it, pushing daisies, a new landowner, napooed, just plain dead, not only dead but scattered around in globs, for the last thing he saw was a shell dropping on top of him with the noise of colliding freight trains, a jim-dandy of a shot from Fritzy the Hun, and kind of ironic, seeing how the whole reason Bagger prefers burial duty is artillery shells can't reach this far behind the frontline trench, but this shell sure did, the way he always pictures it in dreams, a red skull of fire screaming down, giving him one second to think, That old Bagger luck has finally run out,
and the afterlife, for the brief time he knew it, had been delectable, he was gentled back into the arms, and the long, long legs, of Marie-Louise, the prostituée on whom he'd lavished all his francs when the Butcher Birds of the 43rd had been stationed in Vosges, pretty, dry, warm, quiet, bloodless Vosges, where every inhale was Marie-Louise's La Rose Jacqueminot parfum, her rosewater hair and periwinkle powders, every exhale the flutter of her dyed red hair and the lace whatchamacallits of her lingerie,
and so the last thing he wants is someone fucking with him and demanding, "You alive?," to which Bagger responds, "Fuck no," to which the man laughs mirthlessly and pulls him up by the armpits like a breech birth, so Bagger the newborn unseals his eyelids, a crust of mud, oil, and embarrassing tears, and discovers he's being lifted from the burial pit he'd been digging when the mortar hit, now blown to triple its size and is stacked with triple the dead, all being sprayed with quicklime and hastily carpeted in soil,
and Bagger would have been buried alive if not for this sharp-eyed private, he really ought to reward him with a cigarette, but Bagger's distracted by the corpses packed slick hot on all sides of him, one dead doughboy nearly beheaded by a pelvic bone, another who bit it collecting his intestines in one of his boots, a third stomped so flat by a shell that his spinal column protrudes from his gaping mouth,
and yet Bagger, by his own baffled accounting, is intact all the way down to his little piggies, so how the fuck is he alive when everyone who'd been near him, by the look of it, was exploded, shredded, and scattered, he tries to credit the corpse he'd been carrying, it must have absorbed the shrapnel, 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,
and once his ass is on solid ground, more or less, he realizes this marshy patch of land between the Argonne Forest and River Meuse has fallen quiet, and there's nothing more suspicious, a Western Front quiet is tetchy, one side always gets itchy and opts to bleed a few hundred more men over a few inches of land so ruined only a maniac would want it,
and so Bagger sits up with vision aswirl and shoos away the filthy pelt of air, the pigeon-gray smoke and eyeball-white fog, and beyond the hills of diarrheal mud and the pappy craters from whence those hills were upchucked, Bagger sees trucks and carts and wheeled guns crunching east, looks like the whole fucking U.S. First Army, III Corps, 43rd Division has vacated the scene with the likely exception of Bagger's lowly Company P, forever dangled like a gonorrheal dick from the brigade's leftmost flank,
and Bagger feels for his haversack, still there, and extracts his Bible, and opens it, and stuffs his nose into the gutter, and inhales, doesn't give a fuck about kings and shepherds and carpenters and prophets, but the damp protean smell of the book's red leather and the woody scratch of its onionskin pages, each one half-mooned by his father's finger-stains, has a smelling-salt effect on Bagger, has since he was a kid, it brings him back to the cramped study over the church where Bishop Bernard Bagger labored on sermons, back when Cyril's heart, now ...
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.
Daniel Kraus's novel Angel Down takes place late in World War I, just weeks away from the November 11, 1918 Armistice. Private Cyril Bagger, self-professed gambler, con man, and card cheat, has remained safe behind the front lines by volunteering to dig latrines and mass graves. He considers himself a coward, but he's OK with that; his only goal is to survive the war.
After a particularly brutal German artillery assault, someone can be heard shrieking in No Man's Land, and this screeching goes on and on, hour after hour, getting on everyone's nerves. Bagger is ordered, along with four other particularly expendable soldiers, to "take care of" the presumably wounded man. When Bagger finally makes it across the dangerous, cratered battlefield, he finds not an injured person, but an angel entangled in barbed wire. One of the men claims she's the "Angel of Mons" (see Beyond the Book) and as they attempt to take her to headquarters, Bagger is compelled to risk his life to protect her—from enemy fire as well as from his own squadron.
Told in a third-person voice entirely from Bagger's point of view, the novel unspools in one long stream-of-consciousness sentence. The author wisely chooses to break the narrative into shorter chunks separated by white space to make it easier to read; each paragraph, all of which start with "and" and end with a comma, might elsewhere comprise three or four sentences:
"and over the kid's head he glimpses the last marchers vanishing centipedially around a trench corner, the gunmetal sky glowing off the canteens clipped to every pack so it looks like there's a big, silver hole punched through each soldier, the air thick with the molar grind of men overburdened with matériel, the drowsy clops of horse-pulled supply wagons, the asthmatic hack of covered trucks dragging fifty-ton howitzers over cratered rubble,"
The technique risks growing old after a chapter or two, but Kraus's prose is so glorious and his descriptions so alive that the entire book is a marvel. Phrases such as "[his] light brown eyes have gone arachnid with the points of several lanterns" and "Bagger blinks away the ash that snowfalls heavier with each northward step" dot every page, painting a vibrant picture of all the protagonist sees and experiences. All one's senses are engaged ("Bagger has developed a sommelier palate for the tart fizz of brachial blood, the fudgy sorghum of femoral, the meaty sludge of heart wounds…and the warm salt lick of arterial blood he now licks from his lips").
An incredible amount of character development is also woven throughout. Bagger tries to portray himself as a callous, cynical swindler, but we discover he's riddled with lifelong guilt, and buried deep within is a truly good person. His journey toward acceptance of himself, with all his imperfections, helps propel the plot forward.
The novel also offers commentary on the pointlessness of war. The author mentions to Publishers Weekly that Angel Down is, in part, about "the absurdist futility of millions of men dying over a few feet of ruined land" and also remarks, "WWI was the dawn of truly mechanized slaughter, and once begun, that's a self-perpetuating machine that you can't turn off." Although his message risks becoming heavy-handed at a couple of points, overall the author brilliantly illustrates these points throughout the fictional narrative.
Readers might be initially daunted by the novel's structure, particularly if one is unprepared. Although I'm generally open-minded about different writing techniques, I worried Kraus's experimental approach might seem unnecessary and contrived. I'm happy to say that my initial impression was wrong. It didn't take me long to sink into the text's cadence and fully immerse myself in the narrative, and after a few chapters I couldn't imagine any other format being as effective.
The other roadblock for some may be the descriptions of all-pervading gore. Kraus doesn't spare his audience from the horrors of the WWI battlefront. Body parts and viscera are everywhere, people die in stomach-turning ways, and the soldiers are constantly encrusted in blood and muck. The author's depictions are graphic, potentially making the book a challenge for sensitive readers.
I have a penchant for well-written fiction that doesn't fit the typical narrative mold, and Angel Down is right up my alley. The author's brilliant prose, vivid descriptions, interesting characters, and underlying message make this one of my favorites of the year. I imagine that it will be one of those "love it or hate it" types of books, as its single-sentence format may be a high hurdle to overcome for some. If you're looking for a unique book with a ton of depth, however, you can't go wrong with this one—it's absolutely unforgettable.
Reviewed by Kim Kovacs
Rated 5 out of 5
by Michelle_H
Incredible Hallucinatory Novel on Surviving War
I almost never read war novels, but I was drawn to this one because both of my grandfathers fought in WWI, a war I have never understood on any level. The writing is unlike anything I've ever read -- and absolutely necessary to experience what is going on. It's one long sentence that never ends -- but don't let that scare you off, the sentence is broken into easily digestible paragraphs, each one beginning with the word "and" and ending with a comma. An endless shriek is heard, and five "loser" GIs are sent into the thick of battle to "take care of it." They discover a mysterious being who seems to be an angel, and each one deals with it in his own way. The story is utterly engaging and the writing is beautiful, full of incredible metaphors. This novel seems to be about the hallucinatory states necessary to survive war's insanity and make sense of it on some kind of moral level.
Rated 4 out of 5
by Anthony_Conty
A Visceral, Non-Stop Experience
“Angel Down” by Daniel Kraus has a quirky style that may distract some. It technically consists of one continuous sentence, engaging some and leaving others struggling to take a break, but the action of World War I did not slow down for anyone, so I assume the whirlwind stream of consciousness is by design. Imagine “Saving Private Ryan” years ago.
Since the crew has to euthanize someone instead of saving them, it comes as more of a shock that the being is a heavenly creature, blurring the realistic/fantasy lines in most war literature. We descend into the surreal, as many tales of war violence do. The characters, days, and conflicts start to run together, making it unclear whether you'll enjoy the story.
The process is long, as they locate a spirit, suffer from in-fighting, and learn about themselves. War is hell, and authors have to come up with new ways to show us that. We experience death, wounds, and the overall bewilderment usually associated with the Great War. Adding the mystical only adds to the soldiers’ confusion about their roles.
Books with a late climax require the utmost patience, and Kraus rewards those who stick with him. You have to buy into the fantastical setting and go along for the ride. Is there really a resolution when we discover an entire world we didn’t acknowledge? If our goal is to illuminate the horrors of war, do we reveal anything new?
If you like a more visceral experience, give “Angel Down” a try. I spent long periods wondering what was going on, but the ending tied things together significantly. In a world where “Saving Private Ryan” has been remembered more than “The Thin Red Line,” we have to remember 1998, when the latter had significant supporters. This is why that happened.
Rated 3 out of 5
by labmom55
Surreal
I’m not sure what to make of Angel Down, a surreal, at times almost hallucinogenic story of World War I. It certainly gets the gruesome, horrific scenes of war right. At times, it was really hard to listen to. A group of five doughboys, the dregs of their battalion, are given the assignment to enter a no man’s land to rescue the wounded comrade screaming there. But what they encounter, instead, is a fallen Angel. The Angel brings out the best and worst in these five. There’s greed, jealousy, paranoia. Each but Bagger displays egotistical desires. As the Angel says, she is the sword, not the arm. So their wishes lead to more destruction, not less.
The story is told from the viewpoint of Cyril Bagger, a conman and grifter who has survived thus far by always staying behind the lines of engagement. But now, all of a sudden, he’s acting almost heroic at times. I sometimes struggled with the writing. Those who read the book made much of the fact that it’s written as one big run on sentence, but you couldn’t really tell that from the audio narration. It’s just that there were way too many sections that felt overly verbose. Krauss is one of those writers who feels compelled to use 8 adjectives when 2 would do the trick. Yet other descriptions were so spot on, they just grabbed me. The ending turns into a big philosophical diatribe against the evils of man and how things will only get even worse after The War to End All Wars. There was a lot more telling than showing.
I listened to this and while Kirby Heyborne was a fine narrator, I felt it would work better to read this.
Daniel Kraus's novel Angel Down is set on a WWI battlefield in France. After a particularly brutal shelling, Private Cyril Bagger is sent along with a small group of others to "take care of" someone shrieking nonstop in No Man's Land. Instead of a wounded comrade, however, he discovers what appears to be an angel. One of the squad believes she's the Angel of Mons, referring to an incident that occurred during the Battle of Mons on August 22-23, 1914. The rest of the novel follows Bagger's attempts to keep this enigmatic creature safe.
The British declared war on Germany early in August of 1914, and the first troops from the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) were sent to France soon thereafter. The army was positioned at Mons, Belgium on August 22, where they engaged German forces the following day in what was Britain's first major battle of the war. The British forces were vastly outnumbered, 75,000 men and 300 guns to Germany's 150,000 men and 600 guns, but they held off the enemy for most of a day. They were eventually forced to retreat, however, and the Germans won the battle but incurred heavier losses (5,000 casualties compared with Britain's 1,600).
The British public was devastated that their first battle ended in failure, and in search of comfort, a journalist, 51-year-old Arthur Machen, wrote a story inspired by the event. He was touched by the fact that the BEF held off the enemy and endured an exhausting retreat without food or rest, and he crafted these elements into the tale he eventually penned, titled "The Bowmen." In it, a soldier calls upon St. George, who appears on a white stallion surrounded by Welsh longbowmen who then help hold off the Germans. The story was published on the front page of the London Evening News on September 29, 1914, at which point Machen expected it to be forgotten; it was, after all, just a fantasy—a work of fiction. (The full text of the story can be found here, along with the author's introduction and additional stories.)
Some, though, began to take the account literally. Machen was approached by writers for two different publications asking if "The Bowmen" was based on facts (in both cases Machen replied in the negative). A couple of months later, Father Edward Russell, a deacon of St. Alban the Martyr Church in Holborn, asked if he could publish the story in the November issue of his parish magazine, and Machen agreed. Father Russell contacted him again in February saying the account was so popular that he'd like to publish it again, only this time he asked Machen who his sources were. The journalist reiterated that it was a work of fiction, but remarkably, Father Russell refused to believe him.
The story developed a life of its own after that; tales of miraculous rescue at Mons seemed to be everywhere. Soldiers on leave reported that while they themselves didn't witness the event, they'd spoken to others who had. It was even said that German POWs had mentioned witnessing supernatural beings defending British troops. Many variations arose; in some cases the savior was St. George and his archers, but others reported a cloud of blinding light, angels (anywhere from one to hundreds), Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and even Joan of Arc.
The British population, desperate for good news, embraced the tale, happy to know that God was on their side in spite of the mounting casualties, and The Angels of Mons, as the legend became known, had a positive impact on British morale. Even today, despite plenty of evidence to the contrary, many people believe the Angels of Mons were real.
Angel of Mons, Eastleigh War Memorial, courtesy of David Dixon and licensed for reuse under a cc-by-sa/2.0 Creative Commons License
Filed under People, Eras & Events
By Kim Kovacs
During the Great War, a combat nurse searches for her brother, believed dead in the trenches despite eerie signs that suggest otherwise, in this hauntingly beautiful historical novel with a speculative twist, from the New York Times bestselling author of The Bear and the Nightingale.
Winner: BookBrowse Debut Book Award 2023
A haunting, virtuosic debut novel about two young men who fall in love during World War I.
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