Daniel Kraus’ ‘Angel Down’ is a gripping look at war

Editor’s note: “Angel Down” by Daniel Kraus is written in a narrative style that is one continuous sentence. The following review is written in the same style as an homage. 

“and this gets a reaction, the woman smiles, the slightest breeze across pale pink lips, and Bagger senses she’s amused by the question, which embarrasses him, so he refocuses on Arno, who looks five years old, the rain on his face as soft as a mother’s hair, and Bagger has the strange urge to join them in the mud, curl around them both, sleep off the rest of the war,”

and Daniel Kraus published his 22nd novel that came out last summer titled “Angel Down,” and it’s a story set during World War I where Private Cyril Bagger and four other soldiers are instructed to go out and find the “screamer” soldier who was stuck in barbed wire and they were commissioned to find and euthanize him, and as the soldiers come across the “screamer” they discover that she is a wounded angel,

and Private Bagger soon discovers that the real challenge begins as the angel might hold the key to changing the war, and he must keep her safe from his fellow soldiers, and himself, and Bagger realizes that the angel’s influence affects the men around her as the men want to impose all their selfish desires on the angel,

and while the scenes of war are descriptive and devastating, with mud and body parts flying everywhere, some of the other indignities of war are highlighted in this story using a fast-paced stream of consciousness that is disorienting, and Bagger tells the story through his eyes,

and the author shows that faith can be a source of hope, and manipulation, and the book is dark (as all wars are) and continuous, and yet in the darkest moments one can find compassion,

and while the story grabs readers from the beginning, you’ll see that there are no periods as the author chose to write it in a polysyndeton literary style where conjunctions like “and” are used repeatedly, and in quick succession, and by allowing for the style of writing, it reads as if the story is told with urgency and with no break,

and this is how I imagine experiencing a war is, and this happened, and after this, that happened, and wars are continuous, never-ending, and after this war, another war, and another, and another, and read this book,

Deborah Condit is the owner of Books on the Bosque, 6261 Riverside Plaza Lane, Suite A-2 or at booksonthebosque.com.