A horror novel has gained the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for the primary time since Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Highway took the consideration in 2007. That is enormous for each the horror style and its followers: It’s uncommon to see horror tales win prestigious literary prizes, outdoors The Bram Stoker Awards.
Different books that gained the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction have included horrific components. Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys was impressed by the lengthy historical past of the systematic homicide of Black boys at Florida’s Dozier Faculty, and Toni Morrison’s Beloved is an intense examination of the legacy of slavery. However you gained’t discover these books shelved within the horror part at your native bookstore. Kraus’s Angel Down, nonetheless, legitimately might be.
Set throughout World Conflict I, Angel Down tells the story of Non-public Cyril Bagger, a hustler and a con man who will get by within the trenches by swindling his fellow troopers out of their few possessions. Cyril’s instincts and his sense of self-preservation are put to the take a look at when he and 4 different troopers (together with a 14-year-old boy who has ingratiated himself with Bagger) are tasked with wading into No Man’s Land to place a wounded comrade out of his distress. As a substitute of a dying soldier, they discover a fallen angel who seems to have been struck down by artillery hearth.
Anger, jealousy, greed, paranoia, and even lust threaten to tear the group aside as they’re pressured to work collectively to return the angel to their commanding officer in an effort to cease the battle as soon as and for all.
Written as one breathless, bloody, stunning sentence, Angel Down is as miraculous because the angel that Cyril and his fellow troopers discover caught in barbed wire. This isn’t a narrative for the faint of coronary heart, or a straightforward e book to learn by any stretch of the creativeness. Angel Down is a wonderfully balanced mixture of the particular horror of World Conflict I and fictional horror, of each the cosmic and Outdated Testomony selection — this e book incorporates an abundance of wheels and eyes.
Angel Down is relentlessly violent. Bagger will get lined in chunks of different folks a number of instances. Untreated STDs and trench foot are described in gag-worthy element. And one character has such a extreme breakdown that he begins to put on a rotten horse head over his personal head. All of that is magnified by that single-sentence conceit, a degree Kraus hammers residence by telling readers early on: “similar to the battle that gained’t ever finish, just like the carnage gained’t ever finish, it’s a sentence in a e book careening with out durations, gasping with too many commas, a sentence that, as soon as begun, can’t ever be stopped, a sentence doomed to loop again on itself.”
Except for the e book’s violence, Bagger and his compatriots aren’t good folks. It’s troublesome to seek out somebody to really root for when it’s made clear early on that there are not any actual heroes of their Suicide Squad-esque activity drive, solely males who Uncle Sam has diminished to the worst variations of themselves. Nonetheless, Bagger winds up because the group’s ethical compass as they make their method again to the trenches, a glowing, beatific, deeply unsettling angel in tow.
Regardless of its brutality, Angel Down is undeniably stunning. Kraus conjures breathtaking imagery so effortlessly that the novel reads extra like a really lengthy poem than a 300-page novel. It’s not possible to tear your eyes away from Angel Down, and the writing type is a intelligent solution to lure in horror-averse readers who normally keep on with extra mainstream literary works — for example, the Pulitzer Prize Board.
