I completed another interesting book recently. It was called Angel Down by author Daniel Kraus. It was published in 2025, was named a New York Times 10 Best Books and won the Pulitzer Prize in 2026 in the fiction category. All in all it has some pretty decent accolades, I'd say.
What made the book especially interesting to me was the way that it was written. The entire story is told as a stream of consciousness narrative in one continuous run on sentence.
Basically, there are no periods throughout the entire book except in a few moments of dialogue between characters. The book is made up of these short to medium length sections, or paragraphs, with each new one beginning with the word "and."
At first I did find it to be a little awkward to read, but after just a few pages I really got into the style. I generally find that starting any new book takes your brain a moment or two to get into the authors writing style and this one was basically the same. After a few pages my brain found the rhythm and got into the flow of it all. I eventually hit a point where I didn't even notice the oddity of the lack of periods and actually found it to be a very easy and fast way of reading. It was like it increased my reading speed just a little and I even missed the style when I finished the book and started a new one. I was almost like "oh man, I have to read periods again!?! This is bullshit!"
All that aside, the book follows a soldier during World War I and his battalion who come across an Angel who had been struck down by artillery. The Angel falls onto the battlefield amd is eventually found by the main character and his companions in arms. What follows is interesting and I'd say pretty unexpecting. One would assume that an Angel would bring out the best in humanity but it is the opposite for this particular group of soldiers.
The protagonist of the story is an unsavory character with a good heart and when the story reaches its climax, he is given a choice that will decide the fate of the world. The whole scene unfolds in a sort of psychedelic fever dream that is philosophical and symbolic and a good imaginative visual.
The genre is a psychological thriller and has some pretty gruesome scenes in it that border on horror. World War I was considered a very gruesome war so everything written was very fitting for the subject matter in my opinion.
Themes of the story are greed, paranoia jealousy, morality and the chaos of war.
I think that the book being written as a single run on sentence is meant to represent the chaotic nature of war, which I imagine could feel like a never ending flow of violence, fear and adrenaline, among other things. The stream of consciousness style of writing was like seeing a glimpse of someones continuous internal dialog.
All in all I thought that this was a phenomenal book. It was very unique and unexpected in its writing style but somehow it felt very natural and authentic and not at all pretentious. It was also an interesting read and highly entertaining, the type of book that makes you not want to put it down. I gave this one 5 stars and would recommend it, though I will say that I think it is probably marketed more towards a male audience than a female one, stereotypically speaking. By that I mean that all of the characters are male in the book and there is a lot of gruesome war violence that "may" not be appealing to females. That said, if it sounds interesting to you then I do recommend giving it a shot because it was a very unique book that is well worth a read.
