Finding Light After Angel Down

“just like 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,”

- excerpt from Angel Down by Daniel Kraus

Let me start off by issuing an apology to Microsoft Word Spelling and Grammer Check, sorry babe, you’re reeeally not going to like this article. But just imagine how annoying it would have been to be the editor of Daniel Kraus’s Angel Down, a book without any periods.

Okay, let’s go back to the beginning…if such a thing exists

Several weeks ago, I read the book Whalefall by Daniel Kraus. I found it to be so impactful that I not only wrote an article about it and spoke incessantly about it to* my husband and coworkers, I also researched other books written by Kraus, desperate to feel what I felt with Whalefall all over again, with immediacy.

In the end, I chose Kraus’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Angel Down, as my very next read.

And this, I fear, will be my second and final Daniel Kraus novel.

But no, not because it wasn’t good. Because it was too good. Because once again, I was so enraptured with the story that I couldn’t separate myself from it. In Whalefall, I was swallowed by the whale. I was suffocating with only minutes of air left in my tank. I was trapped, claustrophobic, in the belly of the beast.

In Angel Down, I found myself huddled, soiled and shell-shocked, next to

Private Cyril Bagger in a trench deep in the heart of France, unwittingly playing a role in one of the most pivotal attacks of the Great War- the Meuse-Argonne Offensive.

But this? This was no ordinary war novel. It was something much more akin to a religious text. It was the book of Revelation come to life in a terrifying new way. It was Law and it was Gospel. As a reader, I was struck repeatedly, like shrapnel from a grenade, with symbolism so steeped in spiritual subtext, I was given no other choice but to confront my own demons head-on.

Bagger and his four compatriots meet a fallen angel in the middle of the War to End All Wars, and this, they find, is only the beginning of a story that may never end…

“the Solly Madonna the sacrificial lamb as surely as Bagger’s mother, their lives relinquished all so Bagger, a petty swindler, could keep on swindling, he wasn’t worth it then and isn’t worth it now,”

*Please note my deliberate use of the word “to” and not “with” here. No one else I know has read either Whalefall or Angel Down. I have no one to discuss them with! If you find yourself reading either of these novels by Daniel Kraus, I implore you to seek me out for a meeting of the minds. There is much to discuss. You can find me at the library.