After you’ve read Daniel Kraus’ gorgeous, frequently grotesque novel “Angel Down,” which barrels in a single sentence across the corpse-clogged battlefields of World War I France, a question might come to mind — once you’re again on solid ground and your ears have stopped ringing: How the hell does Kraus come up with this stuff?
“And the sky is slashed with yellow howitzer shot revealing body parts in the stew through which they squirm, two severed arms holding hands, boots still potted with feet, a set of shoulders that dangles a curtain of hairy chest, nothing alive here but opportunistic animals, a stoat dragging away a complete digestive system, a blackbird perched atop an opened head to peck at the brains,” Kraus writes in one passage early in the book.
Kraus recently won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for the novel. The man who calls Evanston home taps into a cavernous reservoir of stomach-churning, astonishing imagery in “Angel Down” and, happily for his fans, a wellspring in no danger of running dry.
“I don’t ever really get writer’s block,” Kraus said, chatting with the Chicago Sun-Times last week. “My issue with writing is that I’m going to die before I get everything out. I have so many books I want to write.”
Kraus is among the headliners at this year’s American Writers Festival, featuring some 90 writers June 6 at the American Writers Museum (180 N. Michigan Ave.) and June 7 at the Harold Washington Library Center (400 S. State St.). Kraus is appearing with writer Susan Orlean at noon June 7, at the library center. The two will be discussing cinematic adaptations of their work.
The festival is free and seats are available first come, first served. Previous headliners have included Viet Thanh Nguyen, who won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with his debut novel “The Sympathizer,” and screenwriter and filmmaker Aaron Sorkin.
Writing is “just like breathing” for Kraus. So the last few weeks have felt like a caffeine junkie denied his morning fix.
“My schedule has been swallowed up,” he said of his post-Pulitzer life. “I’m appreciative of it, but it’s a lot. Without going into specifics, it has changed everything almost overnight.”
The Pulitzer jury described “Angel Down” as “a breathless novel …, a stylistic tour-de-force that blends such genres as allegory, magical realism and science fiction into a cohesive whole, told in a single sentence.”
Like “1917,” director Sam Mendes’ one-shot 2019 movie (also set on the cratered battlefields of World War I), Kraus’ single-sentence approach works to evoke the unrelenting horror and nowhere-to-hide nature of trench warfare.
Horror as childhood escape
In “Angel,” five U.S. Army misfits are dispatched to silence the “shriek” of a fallen, fatally wounded comrade somewhere in the “black world hulking beneath the slow cyclones of smoke.” What they find instead is a shrieking real-life angel ensnared in barbed wire. For much of the novel, the angel is mute and just glints of blinding light — a creature impossible to see in any detail.
“The angel in ‘Angel Down’ works like the zombies in ‘Night of the Living Dead,’ or it works like a lot of episodes of ‘The Twilight Zone,’ where it’s a catalyst. It’s there mostly for the characters to reveal themselves,” Kraus said. “They are sort of like time bombs that were going to go off at some point, and this is the thing that pulls the pin of their grenades.”
Kraus grew up in Fairfield, Iowa, a place of wide open spaces dotted with farmhouses, a landscape he found isolating.
“The short version is that horror media, beginning with ‘Night of the Living Dead’ and ‘The Twilight Zone,’ was a way of mastering my fear and anxiety against a world I found threatening. Watching horror became a way of building a suit of armor, film by film, novel by novel,” he said.
The urgency to write took hold in first grade. He and a buddy drew crayon monsters, which led to stories about them in combat.
“Then I never stopped,” Kraus said. “In middle school, I was writing what would essentially be novellas.”
He began writing novels in high school. Some three decades later, Kraus, 50, is the best-selling author of 28 books, from horror to science fiction to young adult. He co-authored two novels with filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, including “The Shape of Water,” which went on to become an Oscar-winning movie.
He writes, he said, like a boxer — really fast, aggressively and “exuding as much power as I can.”
Grueling.
“I want everything to be and to go as hard as I can,” he said. “I don’t want there to be parts of any book that feel like they’re just connective tissues to the next good scene. I want there to only be good scenes.”
Kraus said he’s had a long-standing interest in military conflicts, particularly those involving the United States. And more than 100 years after the end of World War I, the mechanized butchery, the chaos of that conflict still fascinates.
“There is something about how the war was such a stalemate for so long. I wonder if that begat the opposite in art, wanting to explode the status quo … ?” Kraus mused.
Life, post-Pulitzer
Mercifully, Kraus does not talk the way he writes in “Angel Down.” His Midwestern chill is peppered with periods, moments of reflection and patient responses to questions he has certainly answered a hundred times before.
The conversation meanders to life in Evanston, where he lives with his wife, a teacher. You might find Kraus at Reprise Coffee Roasters or Sketchbook Brewing Company, he said. But even now, he’s rarely recognized.
“That’s the great thing about being a writer, you can be Cormac McCarthy and walking down the sidewalk, and no one would know who it was,” he said.
He said he’s written the script for a movie version of “Angel Down.”
Really? A book on the big screen in which human flesh is filleted, fried and in every imaginable way mutilated?
“This feels a lot more possible than ‘Whalefall’ did,” Kraus said of his 2023 novel that has been made into a soon-to-be-released movie. “That’s a book about someone stuck in a whale stomach. Comparatively, this is pretty plausible.”
Kraus is hoping “the crazy” in his life slows down a bit soon because he suspects this full-throttle existence isn’t entirely healthy.
So should readers expect him to ease his foot off the gas in his next novel? Absolutely not. “The Sixth Nik,” his first true sci-fi novel, is due out June 23.
“It’s the most disturbing thing I’ve ever written. It’s a really visceral, upsetting book that, stylistically, could not be more different than ‘Angel Down,’ Kraus said. “It might be the most f—ed up follow-up to a Pulitzer-Prize winning novel in history. If people worried I was softening at all, this will set them straight.”
American Writers Festival runs June 6 at the American Writers Museum (180 N. Michigan Ave.) and June 7 at the Harold Washington Library Center (400 S. State St.). For information, go to americanwritersmuseum.org.