mikerickson@bookwyrm.social reviewed Angel Down by Daniel Kraus
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5 stars
and Bagger, already weighed down in mud and blood, further heavies in the dreary certainty that the shriek won't ever end, just like the war won't ever end, like the carnage won't ever end, it's a sentence in a book careening without periods, gasping with too many commas, a sentence that, once begun, can't ever be stopped, a sentence doomed to loop back on itself to form a terrible black wheel that sooner or later, will drag each and every person to their grave,
The Western Front of WWI is like my all-time guilty pleasure car crash I can't look away from. Such a uniquely horrific human experience on a industrial scale confined to such a small geographic area that to this day I struggle to fully comprehend. Usually when it comes up in media it only features as a flashback or some quick vignette, but here we are …
and Bagger, already weighed down in mud and blood, further heavies in the dreary certainty that the shriek won't ever end, just like the war won't ever end, like the carnage won't ever end, it's a sentence in a book careening without periods, gasping with too many commas, a sentence that, once begun, can't ever be stopped, a sentence doomed to loop back on itself to form a terrible black wheel that sooner or later, will drag each and every person to their grave,
The Western Front of WWI is like my all-time guilty pleasure car crash I can't look away from. Such a uniquely horrific human experience on a industrial scale confined to such a small geographic area that to this day I struggle to fully comprehend. Usually when it comes up in media it only features as a flashback or some quick vignette, but here we are held by the back of the head with our faces pressed up against it, unable to look away. You're gonna need a strong stomach for this one.
I could tell within the first few pages that I was either going to love or hate this book. The entirety of the work is presented as a continuous run-on sentence (don't worry, there are still paragraph breaks and normal-length chapters), something I didn't know going into it. But I got used to it very quickly and didn't exhaust me like it seems to have done to some other readers; if you're hesitant about that, listen to the audiobook instead, which was narrated spectacularly. The style lends itself to an unstoppable forward momentum that at points you wish could be reversed so that some horrible thing won't happen, but deep down both you and the characters experiencing this hell know that the inevitable can't be prevented.
There is some diabolical foreshadowing in this plot I won't spoil but it hit hard once I realized what was happening. And while the supernatural elements slowly ramp up bit by bit to a climax that normally wouldn't sit well with me, on a second read of the penultimate chapters I understood why it was necessary and came back around to respecting the ending. Truly one of the most unique pieces of anti-war media I've ever come across.