Daniel Kraus has written more than two dozen novels and screenplays, but his latest—Angel Down—is the first novel the New York Times–bestselling author says he was nervous to submit since his first. Set amidst the brutal carnage of World War I, it’s the story of a group of five soldiers who stumble across a wounded angel on the battlefield. Angel Down is about the devastating, mutating power of violence and how to remain human in the midst of it, a subject that makes the novel both timeless and acutely of the moment.
Angel Down is an astonishing single sentence, which makes it clear that Kraus doesn’t believe in doing what’s easy. He consistently defies expectations, writing young adult classics like Rotters, blockbuster fantasy series like the Netflix hit Trollhunters (which he co-authored with Guillermo del Toro), and edge-of-your-seat thrillers like Whalefall. It would have been impossible to predict the form and subject of Angel Down, but it’s a book that only someone like Kraus—an expert at his craft who approaches each new project with the enthusiasm of a novice—could have written.
Rowan Beaird
Why, in our current moment, did you decide to write a war novel?
Daniel Kraus
The idea of publishing something in time with what’s happening globally is always a tricky affair, because for me, my ideas are far more nonlinear than that. Years ago, I came up with the premise of an angel that had fallen onto a battlefield. This wasn’t necessarily connected to something topical. It felt more eternal, this thesis that World War I was the start of mechanized slaughter. And once we take ourselves out of the process of killing each other, which these days has reached its zenith with drones and AI, where you can bomb people by just hitting a button and then sleep perfectly well at night, we’ve forged a wheel that we can’t stop. With this cycle of violence, we’ve essentially created a self-replicating machine that will just continue to make killing easier and easier until it means nothing to us. And that’s also how I came up with the writing style—the whole book as a representation of this wheel that goes around and around.
Rowan Beaird
I think I was about two pages in when I realized it had just been one sentence up until that point, and I thought, oh, wow, is he going to pull this off for the whole book? From a craft perspective, I admire it so deeply because you’re able to maintain a really incredible rhythm and clarity and pacing. How did you approach that task? Did it change your process?
Daniel Kraus
Anytime I start a new book, I try to change it so radically that I have to relearn how to write a novel. And by removing the periods from your sentences, it radically changes how you write to a very basic function. The order of words that you’re used to putting down on a page no longer works anymore. And so what ended up happening was exactly what you’re saying—this rhythm started building up that felt like I was in a vehicle of some sort, and I was speeding along, and you know how when you’re on a highway, you can hear the tires? It’s almost like a heartbeat, and sometimes it speeds up when you know the interstate or slows down when you’re taking an off-ramp. You’re not even necessarily aware of this rhythm because you’re inside the vehicle, and the book, it’s not in iambic pentameter, but it has that sort of effect. It feels like you’re on the rails of something that you can’t control. Writing the book was sort of yielding to the velocity of this machine that I was building, that mirrors the death machinery of World War I.
Rowan Beaird
That mirror is so powerful, and I’m curious, just thinking about the classic novels of World War I, like All Quiet on the Western Front, A Farewell to Arms, do you see your novel in conversation with those novels?
Daniel Kraus
No, the book isn’t a rejoinder to existing books, and that was intentional. I didn’t want to place it as part of the canon of war books, necessarily. It’s more that I just wanted to talk about violence, and it seemed like this was the historical point in which to talk about it. And I think generally when I’m writing anything, I stay away from books that are in that genre—I don’t want to be influenced. It’s an impossible hope, but I always hope to do something that’s not like anything.
Rowan Beaird
Well, the setting itself is so visceral and gruesomely alive. What was your research process?
Daniel Kraus
I have to be aware not to do too much research because I’ve gotten lost in research before. And particularly if you’re dealing with war, there’s just an endless amount of sources to deal with. Everything’s a gigantic can of worms. But research for this book was relatively straightforward, as opposed to my previous novel, Whalefall, for example, where I had to do a lot of in-person interviews. I was basically dealing with books and documentaries and second-hand materials. My theory on research is that the reader doesn’t have to follow it all. If I’m running through various details about machine guns, for example, the reader doesn’t have to necessarily understand what I’m talking about. They just have to believe that I know what I’m talking about.
Rowan Beaird
The book’s protagonist, Cyril Bagger, is so complex. He’s a con man, he’s a preacher’s son, he’s a gravedigger plagued by shame. How did he take shape?
Daniel Kraus
I knew, for plot reasons, that I needed five soldiers of ill repute, who for various reasons were not considered valuable to the division. And for Bagger, I wanted somebody who was dealing with death a lot, who keeps himself as distant as possible from the other men. He’s essentially alone in the world, and he’s convinced himself that’s the way he wants to be, and I wanted part of his journey to be to have to care for somebody.
My tendency is always to start with characters who are kind of bad. I’ve always been interested in testing readers’ sympathy. I think it’s all too easy in books to make characters likable. To make things difficult for myself, I always want to start at the other pole. How bad can I make someone and still have the reader care about them? I have absolutely no interest in good versus evil, but I have endless interest in bad versus worse.
Rowan Beaird
I’d love to talk about the angel. Where did you find inspiration for her—or, it?
Daniel Kraus
I started with the common conception of what people in that era would have thought an angel looks like, which is a little different than what, if you ask people today, they would think of. Today, movies and TV shows have made angels into slightly more dramatic or sexy beings, but if you go back to biblical texts, angels are these horrifying monsters that don’t even resemble human beings. They’re just these wheels with eyes, defying any kind of rational comprehension. So I liked the idea of playing with what we want to see versus what is really there, and of course, the very end of the book gets into the idea that what all these men have been seeing is not what they thought.
Rowan Beaird
Obviously, I don’t want to spoil the book for readers, but it’s such an incredible ending. Did you always know where it was headed?
Daniel Kraus
Even though I did know where I wanted to go with it, I was a little scared by it. I knew it was gonna take the form of this flight of fancy that yanks you out of this very realistic story. There’s a way that can go totally wrong, and people would just say, wow, he was doing great right up until the end of the book. But I also knew it was a big swing, and that if I could pull it off, it would be really remarkable. I wanted to do something completely different in the hopes that this Hail Mary pass at the end would connect, and that it would, at the very least, be provocative.
Rowan Beaird
I can’t imagine it ending in any other way. How do you think this book changed you as a writer?
Daniel Kraus
This is my 25th book, and since finishing, I’ve written, I’m not exaggerating, five more books, but this is the first book since my very first that I was nervous about sending to my editor. She bought it on just a one-page summary of the plot, and so nobody knew that I had written this in one sentence, nobody knew the style, and it was so different from anything else I had done, that I did not have any sense of whether this was an utter disaster. I was so turned around by it.
When my editor responded with extreme enthusiasm, I think that was the moment that the book taught me something. It was a vote of confidence, I think, that told me to keep stretching, keep risking, and daring yourself to go into these unfamiliar places. And you know, it really is my favorite book of mine, and I think that’s because of the emotions of not being sure if it was any good at all. I think I had lost some confidence in just how far afield I could go, and this reaffirmed that I should continue to follow my weird ideas.
Rowan Beaird
What advice do you give to—I was about to say young writers—but really, all writers?
Daniel Kraus
You know, the smartest advice is advice I haven’t taken, which is do a thing and do it really well. Agents and editors talk about building your brand, and they do so for a really good reason, because when you switch up genres and styles and formats, you lose readers. Now, you might find some too, but mostly you’re going to confuse and frustrate them. And I’ve done that many times, and it has been a very up-and-down career, where I’ve got some bestsellers, and I’ve got some worst-sellers, too.
Now, you have to survive long enough for there even to be a long run, but in the long run, for me, it’s still been wonderful. So really, my advice is to just keep working on a lot of stuff if you can, because I think the biggest thing I’ve done to help myself, and my career, is that I’ve got so many projects going at any one time that nothing bothers me too much. A book can come out and be a hit and it doesn’t affect me much. A book can come out and be a disaster and it doesn’t affect me much. When I finish a book at 10:30 in the morning, five minutes later, I’m moving on to the next project. I don’t take the day off. I write like I’m going to the factory and putting in my hours, and that’s served me extremely well.
FICTION
Angel Down
By Daniel Kraus
Atria Books
Published on July 29, 2025
