Review: Angel Down by Daniel Kraus, at Strange Horizons

Earlier this year, the literary and genre fiction communities were startled by the announcement that Daniel Kraus's Angel Down, a fantasy-horror novel in which a squad of WWI soldiers discover an angel on the killing fields of 1918 France, had won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. This is not the first time that a novel in the fantastical genres had won this award—it is preceded by books like The Underground Railroad, A Visit from the Goon Squad, and The Road—but as I write at the beginning of my review of the book, published today at Strange Horizons, there are different kind of genre fiction, just as there are different kinds of literary fiction. I was surprised that the Pulitzer jury had the kind of genre fiction that Kraus writes on their radar, and even more surprised that the Pulitzer board, when offered a choice between Angel Down and more traditional nominees like Katie Kitamura' Audition and Torrey Peters's Stag Dance, would choose to recognize Kraus's novel.

All of which is to say that when I got a chance to read it last month, I approached Angel Down with curiosity and not a little bit of excitement, and one should take that into account while reading my rather negative review. But as I write there, what I found in Angel Down is, in almost every respect, thin, and it feels almost like an insult to have recognized this genre novel when I could name, off the top of my head, several others that are more formally experimental, more boldly political, and more interested in their fantastical conceit. 

Like the picture postcards you might see in a View-Master, there's a certain posed, ticky-tacky quality to the images that Angel Down presents, which keep reaching for the familiar commonplaces and clichés of its setting. Does Bagger contemplate the Uncle Sam "I want YOU for US Army" poster before being forcibly recruited? Of course he does. Does his disappointed father, eager to revitalize his faith by preaching to the troops, set sail for Europe aboard the doomed Lusitania? Inevitably. Mary Pickford, the Angel of Mons, "The War to End All Wars," Big Bertha, "lions led by donkeys," the Spanish flu, the assassination of the archduke Franz Ferdinand, "Over There": Despite the obvious relish with which the book foregrounds the brutality and depravity of a WWI battlefield, what really seems to power it is this barrage of references that readers can be trusted to recognize. These are the tropes of a WWI story, rather than the story itself.

It's a long review, which gives me a chance to discuss not only the different things we mean when we say "fantasy" and "litfic", but also what happens when we combine a real-world atrocity such as WWI with the fantastical genres (along the way making a detour to discuss A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book, which is in many ways about that very question), and whether realism can be taken to such extremes that it feels like its own kind of fantasy. I would have liked to enjoy Angel Down, but failing that, I think I've managed to write well about why I didn't.

If you enjoyed reading this review, please consider donating to support Strange Horizons, which is in the final week of its annual fund drive. There aren't a lot of venues that would publish a 3,000-word negative review of a novel published last year, but I knew from the moment I decided to review Angel Down that Strange Horizons, and its stalwart reviews editor Dan Hartland, would understand this piece and want to publish it. If you value that sort of thing, please consider helping to keep the magazine going.

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