When Daniel Kraus’s Angel Down won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction this spring, it occasioned both celebration and bewilderment. A genre novel won the Pulitzer! But also, this genre novel? There’s often a tendency to treat the divide between genre and literary fiction as something akin to a class struggle, in which snooty elites look down on the unwashed masses. The truth is, of course, much more complicated, and one way in which this is the case is that—not unlike actual class systems—there are, within both literary and genre fiction, minute and fine-grained distinctions that are sometimes only legible to insiders. Attributes such as cover design, publishing imprint, and blurbs indicate to readers and critics what precise sort of thing, within the vast spectrum of things that are covered by the umbrella categories of “literary fiction” and “genre fiction,” a particular book is.
In his career so far, Daniel Kraus—bestselling author, collaborator of such luminaries of pop culture as Guillermo del Toro and George Romero—has sent out a certain set of signals. To reviewers such as myself—who like to believe that we read, and champion, the types of books that the Pulitzer board, if feeling particularly adventurous, might choose to recognize—these signals made him practically invisible. Nor is this blind spot the preserve of genre critics alone; except for one review in the New York Times, Angel Down received virtually no attention from mainstream critical venues. And yet, here it is, winning the Pulitzer.
I’d like you to believe that for most critics, this sort of unexpected outcome is genuinely exhilarating. It’s so rare to be surprised in this business. There’s nothing a reviewer loves more than to discover a great book where they had no expectation of finding one, whether they are the first person to read it or the millionth.
I’d like you to believe this, because as I have just finished saying, I am not the sort of reviewer who tends to read Daniel Kraus’s books, and so the fact that I am about to be very negative about this one could—and perhaps, under other circumstances, should—be dismissed as a case of wrong reader, wrong book. But the Pulitzer board (and before them, the Pulitzer jury, who selected three novels for the board to choose between) named Angel Down the best work of fiction published in 2025, and as a genre reader and critic, I am here to say that this verges on an insult.
A genre novel won the Pulitzer, but did it have to be this novel? Not Rakesfall by Vajra Chandrasekera (2024), or Audition by Pip Adam (2025), or Goliath by Tochi Onyebuchi (2022), or any of the many genre novels of the last few years that are formally and thematically adventurous and do genuinely exciting things with their genre conceits? Maybe the class war folks had it right: If this is what the luminaries of mainstream recognition think of us, we might be better off without them.
Now might be a good time to back up. Angel Down is a novel of the first World War, with a twist. It is October 1918, and in the blasted, ruined landscape of Bois du Fays, a division of American doughboys is being rotated off the front lines. Left behind is a cobbled-together squad made up of the division’s least-respected soldiers: Goodspeed, an inveterate looter who has amassed a small fortune robbing the bodies of his own side’s dead as well as the enemy’s; Popkin, a slow-witted bully; Veck, a shell-shocked flamethrower operator seconded from an all-Black regiment; Arno, an orphan who lied about his age to join up; and our protagonist, Cyril Bagger.
A huckster and conman in his civilian life, Bagger has deployed his facility at cheating at cards, dice, and any other game of chance to achieve his survival. By hustling his fellow soldiers out of their latrine and burial duties, he has contrived to avoid ever going over the top. Until now, that is. Outraged over his failure to single-handedly win the war and blaming the substandard human material he’s been provided with for that failure, Bagger’s commander has given the five soldiers a mission: to venture out into no-man’s land, find whoever it is out there who has been shrieking relentlessly for hours, and—one way or another—take care of them.
“The last patrol” has been a staple of war stories for decades, and—but for the aforementioned twist, which we will get to in due course—Kraus does not overcomplicate it. Plotwise, Angel Down is a simple novel, the three segments of which chart, respectively, its characters’ journey towards their destination, what they find when they reach it, and what happens when they return. The thing that sets the novel apart—and which may have distinguished it in the eyes of the Pulitzer jury—is its style. Angel Down is told as a sequence of passages, each a run-on, continuous sentence, beginning with an uncapitalized “and,” and ending in a comma:
and so Bagger sits up with vision aswirl and shoos away the filthy pelt of air, the pigeon-grey 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,
This is skillfully accomplished and clearly purposeful—as Bagger informs us at the end of the novel’s first chapter, “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.” Once the initial confusion has faded, and the realization that, yes, it is all going to be like this has settled in, Angel Down is actually a very readable novel, and it’s to Kraus’s credit that he commits to such a challenging stylistic choice and carries the reader along with it.
But, although many reviewers have described Angel Down as a novel written in a single sentence, that is not what Kraus has produced, and nor is it how the book reads. Most continuous writing has the effect of making its narrative feel unstoppable, but Kraus’s chapter and paragraph breaks have the opposite effect. They give the impression of a series of tableaux, like images in an old-fashioned stereoscope. You pull the lever, the light goes out and comes back on again, and a new image emerges.
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 filled with smoke, was filled with what must have been hope,
Like the picture postcards you might see in a View-Master, there’s a certain posed, ticky-tacky quality to the images that Angel Down presents, which keep reaching for the familiar commonplaces and clichés of its setting. Does Bagger contemplate the Uncle Sam “I want YOU for US Army” poster before being forcibly recruited? Of course he does. Does his disappointed father, eager to revitalize his faith by preaching to the troops, set sail for Europe aboard the doomed Lusitania? Inevitably. Mary Pickford, the Angel of Mons, “The War to End All Wars,” Big Bertha, “lions led by donkeys,” the Spanish flu, the assassination of the archduke Franz Ferdinand, “Over There”: Despite the obvious relish with which the book foregrounds the brutality and depravity of a WWI battlefield, what really seems to power it is this barrage of references that readers can be trusted to recognize. These are the tropes of a WWI story, rather than the story itself.
Perhaps this reveling in the familiar (not to say banal) is meant to foreground what Angel Down adds to its setting that did not exist in actual history, the twist that I have been teasing for paragraphs despite it being right there in the novel’s title, the thing that makes its Pulitzer win of interest to this magazine and this critic. When Bagger and his squad arrive at the source of the shriek that has been rending their already-tenuous peace of mind for hours, what they find is, unaccountably, a woman: “there’s no mistaking the copper sheet of hair, the delicate fingers splayed as if in want of a handhold, the gather of red dress over her hips, the swathe of blue cape off her slender shoulders, the cream skin.” A woman whose face glows like a spotlight. A woman who floats above the ground, and who saves Bagger and Arno from a German artillery shell. Not a woman, then; an angel.
Let’s pause a moment from our discussion of Angel Down, and consider the fusion of real historical atrocity—in some ways mundane, in others not at all—and genre tropes. In A. S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book (2009), a novel that is in many ways about the codification of the fantastic into a genre, and its separation from what we now call literary fiction, two women who grew up among the great fantasists of the late nineteenth century observe soldiers in a hospital just off the French front lines as they put on a play. The drama in question is a precise recreation of the trial and execution of a deserter. Discussing the play, the women wonder whether the choice to depict reality exactly as it was, with no commentary and certainly no fantastical flourishes, is the only way people can face up to the horror of what they have witnessed.
For the rest of the twentieth century and to this day, this approach—strict, uninflected realism—has been one stream in literature about the horrors of which humanity is capable (we shall leave for another day the discussion of whether “realism” is really all that realistic). At the same time, fantasy has grown more codified, more trope-laden, full of conventions which readers can be trusted to recognize and follow along. When authors apply these tropes to real atrocity, it often raises the question of what, between the real and the fantastical, they most want us to pay attention to.
It is with this question of attention that Kraus seems to struggle. On the one hand, we have the angel: smiling enigmatically, placidly enduring any hardship or indignity, performing minor miracles—healing an injury, resurrecting a kitten—at the characters’ request. As the members of the squad take center stage, one after the other, they each reveal that they perceive her as a different person or symbol, and that they believe she can grant them some deeply-held wish: riches, sex, retribution.
On the other hand, the book remains true to the conventions of the war novel. As Bagger and his squad escort the angel back towards their lines, and as the other soldiers try to exert their will over the angel, they predictably—perhaps inevitably, given the novel’s last patrol premise—begin to drop off. This process, instead of intensifying the novel’s horror, ends up revealing its limitations. Kraus, one eventually comes to feel, did not care about these characters except as figures who could take up space between departure and return.
Goodspeed goes first, presumably because his cynical hustler persona is too similar to Bagger’s. Popkin—dumb, fat, mean—would be an offensive caricature if there was any meat on the character’s bones. Veck, in contrast, has too much going on: The chapters in which he reveals that he has a young daughter back home, or that he has been driven to nihilism by the realization that no sacrifice on his part will induce white officers and soldiers to see him as an equal, threaten to overbalance the novel. Plucky and determined Arno should have been the company pet, not someone you’d throw into no-man’s land: He is included in the squad because Bagger needs someone to care about, the better to indicate to the readers that Bagger is worth caring about as well. If this is realism, it is a lazy sort of realism, gesturing at other people’s stories to borrow a significance that this story has not delivered.
But again, perhaps the familiarity of its human characters is intended to draw attention to Angel Down’s fantastic conceit. In its best moments, the novel knows how to use the angel to disquieting effect. Though there is, unsurprisingly, a scene in which she strides, Wonder Woman-like, into no-man’s land, bullets bouncing harmlessly off her invulnerable body, in other places Kraus reaches for more distinctive imagery. When the angel, responding to Veck’s distress, causes the bodies of dead soldiers to rise up and surround him, floating in the air like marionettes, or when she appears to Bagger as a grotesque approximation of a soldier wearing a gas mask (“two jet-black eyeballs the size of tea plates protruding from malformed lumps of wrinkled brown flesh, the face narrowing into an aardvark trunk, the end of which is layered in rings of tiny needle teeth”), it feels like an alien attempting to grasp the ungraspable; to convey the message “be not afraid” in a place where fear—not of her, but of the normal, ordinary reality around her—is the only rational response.
Such moments are, however, the exception rather than the rule. Most of the time, when Angel Down wants to shock or disquiet, it reaches not for the supernatural conceit of the angel, but for the conventional horrors of a WWI battlefield. To Bagger cavalierly flicking another man’s ear off his face after surviving a bombardment. To him leading Arno past decapitated heads. To a game he plays for the sake of his teetering sanity, in which unspeakable sights are transformed into something benign and even wholesome.
a skinny pair of legs are two birchwood baseball bats, the gap where a man’s nose used to be is the precise contours of a succulent pear, the big black liver lying there is a leather purse straight from the Marshall Fields racks, he can nearly detect the perfumed tickle of forgotten affluence,
This sort of thing is shocking the first or second time, but after a while it develops an enervating effect. Not unlike Edward Berger’s 2022 remake of All Quiet on the Western Front, there is a feeling here that the novel, in the guise of bearing witness, is showing off. Kraus’s feats of grotesque inventiveness are reminiscent of Berger’s glorious depictions of bodily destruction in crystal-clear HD. Realism, it turns out, has its limits. Too much of it can come to feel indistinguishable from fantastic invention.
This, then, might be our answer to the question of how a genre novel about the real horrors of history justifies itself. If the parts of Angel Down that are drawn purely from history are overly familiar and self-satisfied, the parts of it that are fantastical are where the novel breathes. Where it allows itself to be strange and unpredictable; to be fully itself.
Unfortunately, this only lasts so long. In its final segment, Angel Down finds Bagger, Arno, and the angel rejoining the 43rd division. Bagger, convinced by now that the angel has the power to end the war, delivers her to his commanding officer. Who reacts like everyone else in the novel has done: by imposing his own ideas and wishes on her. The result is horror, but not the strange, disquieting horror of the earlier parts of the novel. Now, at the final stretch, Kraus seems determined to make his point. Specifically, to use the angel as a means of making a point, as in a chapter-long sentence in which she reveals to Bagger a vision of the future of humanity.
life doesn’t beget life, it’s death that begets death, so foundational a principle it has become civilization’s engine, an inferno of grief that, nut by screw by rivet, is refashioned into outrage and hysteria and vengeance and moral polarity, a cycle perfected by the so-called War to End All Wars, which, Bagger understands with horror, is really the War to Begin All Wars, countries carved into furious parcels and technology matured to a stage of perpetual regeneration, an entire industrial complex, the hatreds of one age inherited by the next, the next, the next,
War, Daniel Kraus would like us to be made aware, is hell. Not the most original of messages, and to be fair a novel does not have to say something new to be worth reading, especially when the truism it’s delivering is so fundamental. But if you’re going to say something that so many people before you have already said, you need to say it in a way that is ineluctably yours. Angel Down, so riddled with the familiar and the clichéd, does not do this. The style is not enough: Long before we reach the final pages it has come to feel like a gimmick, whose purpose is to impress rather than reveal. The angel is not enough: By the story’s end she is overpowered by the narrative’s need to use her as a mouthpiece; to explain, again and again, how Bagger (and we) should think and feel. Bagger is not enough: He spends the novel moving from cynicism to faith to despair to a determination to live despite the world’s awfulness, a journey whose steps we might have been able to diagram from the novel’s opening pages, with barely a foot out of place.
“Not enough” feels like a succinct way of summing up Angel Down’s flaws. As an experimental novel, as a WWI story, as a work of genre fiction, it is, at every turn, thin. It would mark me out as a member of the snooty elites if I say that the Pulitzer jury and board should have known better than to reward a novel of such thinness. So instead let me say this: I would rather have read a work of pure genre fiction. Something like Alice Winn’s In Memoriam (2023), which follows two public schoolboys to the trenches where they are forced to confront their love for one another; or Katherine Arden’s The Warm Hands of Ghosts (2024), in which a soldier gone missing on the battlefield is revealed to be the prisoner of a malevolent fairy. These works are camp, but they are honest camp. They don’t pretend that the supernatural can inflect history and its horrors, but accept that it can merely reflect them—a reflection that Angel Down, for all its flourishes, never achieves.