Angel Down by Daniel Kraus
To say this is a bold and ambitious horror novel might be the understatement of the year; to me, this is the bold kind of masterpiece that puts it in the realm of next-level art house horror like Due’s The Reformatory or SGJ’s Buffalo Hunter Hunter. The fact that Kraus and Jones both released novels that any normal year would be a guarantee for a Stoker is a healthy sign for the genre in general.
An argument could be made that this novel is as much a fantasy or a historical war novel as it is a horror novel. It is all those things, and at the same time, an experimental narrative style. If you don’t know the experiment, the idea that Daniel Kraus was working with was a novel that was all one sentence. If the majority of the text is a total block of words that is daunting, so before you hell no this book, understand there are what amount to paragraphs and chapters. This makes for an easier experience for the reader, but I was ready to be challenged. I get it, one time I wanted to publish a novella with a chapter that counted down to chapter one and then zero, a trick that Nolan and Johnson did with Logan’s Run back in the day. My editor on that anthology insisted that it would confuse the reader.
My experience with Angel Down is I forgot about it fairly quickly. Much like reading a novel in first person, if it is a good enough story, I will forget. The flow of the novel is such that once I got into the story, I was sold and engaged. The way the narrative rolls through it feels cinematic and immersive.
Set during the Great War (AKA WW I), Cyril Bagger has avoided the terrible trenches and no man’s land by lying and forcing himself into duty away from the lines. His father was a preacher, judgmental, maybe a bit conman. It is amazing how much backstory into the characters we get. This is another treat of the narrative I was surprised by.
As the novel gets going, Bagger and his squad have to rescue a friend across the battlefield. There, they make a shocking discovery in the middle of the field.
As the title implies, it is a spiritual being, and the introduction of the character is emotionally powerful, as I was hoping. What this sign means is different for everyone involved, and the source of the tension Kraus builds throughout the rest of the novel.
“…And then for their sins, the Angel does it, an Angel is how Bagger will think of the woman from now on, for good, forever, he wishes he could gravel before her for having doubted, for when the Angel opens her mouth at the last strike of the nozzle kind of bagger realizes She's never opened her mouth before, her cryptic smiles have never been tight lipped, and inside are no white teeth, no pink palette, only the light that has bled through her all along, only this time in concentrate IP on white a uterine passage into another round…”
A one-of-a-kind reading experience that is a good reminder, after centuries of published novels, there is still original stuff to be down. Angel Down is a fantastic work of dark fantasy and horror. A living, breathing question about the morality of war, something the greatest war novels of history have always done. This is a great war novel, as much as a great horror novel. Great stuff.
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