After a battle, an American WWI unit is perturbed by an awful shrieking coming from the middle of the field. The commander sends five of his most expendable soldiers out to “take care” of the problem, which they all understand means they are to go find the dying soldier and put him out of his misery. But when Private Bagger, an Iowa preacher’s son and career con artist, and Private Arno, an innocent teenager who lied about his age to enlist, stumble upon the source of the shriek, they discover to their surprise that it is coming not from a wounder soldier, but from a woman of preternatural beauty who emits a strange and powerful light.
Yes, the Angel of the title is meant literally. The ethereal woman on the battlefield is a celestial being with enormous powers. As they try to shepherd the angel back to their unit, the five soldiers all find themselves powerfully tempted by what the angel has to offer. They project their desires upon her. For young Arno, the angel takes the form of the mother he sorely misses. For another, she is his daughter he hopes to make proud. Another sees his sweetheart. And one sees only a cash cow.
As for Private Bagger, he finds himself behaving in many surprising ways in the presence of the angel. She seems to make him want to be a better man, more in the image of his preacher father, who died on the Lusitania.
The elephant in the room with this novel is that it’s written as one long sentence. Except, it isn’t really. Of course it isn’t. It’s a cheap gimmick that author Daniel Kraus doesn’t even pretend to fully commit to. I’m sorry, but just because you start each new paragraph with “and,” and refuse to punctuate correctly, that does not actually make your book one long sentence. For goodness sake, there are chapter breaks. How are you going to have chapter breaks in the middle of a sentence?
In addition to the silliness of this structural gimmick, Angel Down is also bogged down by Kraus’s drawn-out plotting and numbing repetition. Kraus is obsessed with the deprivations and degradations of warfare, especially trench warfare. He catalogs an impressive array of disgusting dietary habits and humiliating ways to die. But’s it all feels rather hollow. It also stops the story from really getting anywhere, perhaps because it never feels like Kraus actually cares about it.
