Every year, I try to read the novel that won the Pulitzer Prize, one of fiction’s most prestigious awards. When I heard that Angel Down, by Daniel Krauss, was the 2026 winner, I was hesitant.
The first thing I had heard about the novel was that it was written in one continuous sentence that goes on for the entire 285 pages of the book. Sounds daunting. Sounds unpleasant as a reading experience. I wasn’t in the mood to get bogged down in an arcane work of literature.
But Angel Down was a fantastic read. The story takes place in France in the hellish trenches of World War I, and centers on Private Cyril Bagger, a former draft dodger and con man, who, along with four of his fellow soldiers, is ordered to venture into no-man’s-land between enemy lines to perform a mercy killing of a wounded comrade whose continuous screaming is fraying everyone’s nerves.
What they find amid the ruined battlefield is not a suffering soldier but a fallen, glowing angel, apparently struck down by artillery fire and now caught in a mesh of barbed wire.
Bagger and company are determined to carry this celestial being to safety, but soon jealousy, greed, and paranoia set in among the soldiers as each wants to save the angel for his own selfish purposes. The group is unable to unite in saving the angel, who is perhaps key to ending the brutal conflict, and instead turn on each other.
Angel Down is a strange, propulsive, and mesmerizing novel, a mashup of genres: gritty war story, visceral horror, and magical realism. And the single, very run-on sentence? Honestly, I hardly noticed it. There are many paragraph breaks, with each succeeding paragraph beginning with the word ‘and’, tons of commas, and 44 chapters. Call it a concept, call it a gimmick, and the effect is to perhaps thematically reflect the endless cycle of war and immerse the reader in the relentless violence and chaos of combat.
I think the effect could have been achieved without relying on a single continuous sentence, but this decision on the part of Krauss certainly got a lot of attention and made the novel stand out from others.
Definitely worth the read.
