Angel Down—Daniel Kraus

I was not emotionally prepared for Daniel Kraus’ 2025 book, Angel Down. I can’t remember what drove me to pick it up in the first place, although it lives firmly within my wheelhouse. Man’s inhumanity to man? Check. The utter indifference of heaven? Check. Biblical allusions that don’t turn out like what you’ve been led to believe. Oh, yea.



Had I looked up Kraus’ CV before jumping in, I would have noticed his bona fides as a past collaborator with such masters of the filmic horror genre no less than George A. Romero and Guillermo del Toro. Even so, I should have been tipped off by the cover blurb by one of my favorite authors of this decade, Stephen Graham Jones.

There is a scene in Jones’ The Only Good Indian that still haunts me five years after I read it. Perhaps the saving grace of the depth of real horror that Kraus serves up from the trenches of the Western Front is that the senses become so overwhelmed that nothing sticks. In the immortal words of Johnny Cash, speaking on yet another war, Drive on, it don’t mean nothin’. Can you become shell-shocked from a novel?

My favorite stories all have a memorable anti-hero, this book has five… well, four and a total innocent that is unfairly lumped in with the rest. These doughboys are saddled with a suicide mission precisely due to their expendability. Their vainglorious commanding officer, the only character that rings a little hollow, sends the mismatched quintet out to the middle of No Man’s Land as the division retreats as a way to rid himself of them all in one fell swoop.

The relentless style that Kraus employs, as if the entire book were one run-on sentence, propels the reader headlong through the narrative, as if you, too, were scrambling over the broken pieces of men and machines in a desperate bid to save… oneself? A wayward angel? All of mankind? In the end, the effect is one of exhausted fatalism. “Them that die’ll be the lucky ones,” as Robert Louis Stevenson’s Long John Silver famously stated.

Krause is capable of dark flights of poetic abstraction as well, as best shown when our final anti-hero is driven into the center of the Earth, to Hell itself, in a peek behind the curtain that rivals the mechanical dread of Ken Kesey’s Combine, the machine behind the scene in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.