PODCAST PRIMES PONDERS : DANIEL KRAUS [ 2 ]

The New York Times Book Review chose Daniel Kraus's '' Angel Down '' a gory novel told in one long, never ending sentence about World War 1 soldiers who encounter a fallen angel - as one of the Best Books of 2025.

.-  What were the challenges of this approach ?

Clarity. I never had a book that was such a mess, because the trade-off of that velocity in the writing is spatial confusion.

After I marked up the first draft, the paper looked pink ; nothing but red pencil everywhere.

When you don't have periods, you depend on that sort of rhythm of tires beneath a car on the highways.  Ba-boom, ba-boom, ba-boom. Its like that heartbeat that speeds and slow-downs. You can plug into that rhythm.

But it was unclear who was standing where and what was flying by - the really nuts-and-bolts stuff. The easy stuff in a normal book became the hard stuff in this one.

.-  This is a war novel, but it's also a horror novel. Do you consider it in that genre?

I don't know where to put it. I honestly don't. I had the same issue with my previous book, '' Whalefall '' I have seen it shelved in horror and in sci-fi and in literature. 

My roots are in horror and I grew up in horror. So whether or not I would call it a horror novel, there's elements of horror that infect - which is a fun word - all of my books.

I will have things that are terrifying or gross. But I've always tried to write about that stuff as beautifully as possible. It's almost been the thing that I've hung my whole career on, trying to find beauty where there shouldn't be.

!WOW! thanks The New York Times.