Phil W. Bayles

Or: How I Learned To Write A Oner.

I’ll be honest: I didn’t expect to write another one of these so soon. But then I didn’t expect to blast finish this book in four days.

Daniel Kraus’ Angel Fall is about a squad of misfit American soldiers in the closing days of World War I, sent into No Man’s Land to rescue (or maybe just euthanise) a fallen comrade whose screams are haunting the battlefield. What they find instead is an angel, fallen to earth and tangled in barbed wire. The soldiers see her as a beautiful woman, but as they begin to fight amongst themselves over her she reveals herself to be more like the terrifying, biblically accurate angels of old; the kind of monstrous figure Guillermo del Toro might draw on a really bad day.

Even before this divine intervention, though, the story is a cavalcade of horrors. Almost every page contains nauseating descriptions of human bodies torn apart by shells, burned from the inside by gas, or twisted beyond recognition by the arrogance of the old men shoving them into meat grinders.

What really makes Angel Fall such a fascinating read is that it’s written as a single, unbroken sentence; the literary equivalent of Sam Mendes’ film 1917, which was cleverly edited to give the illusion of a single, unbroken camera shot. Kraus — unburdened by working in prose instead of visuals — can push this to its limit, weaving expertly in and out of flashbacks and stretching and condensing time as he needs to. Even so, it’s an impressive piece of prose; one that simultaneously manages to convey the seeming endlessness of the Great War and the urgency of the fighting on the front lines.

Now I’m desperate to read more books by Kraus. Oh, look — his last book, Whalefall, is apparently being turned into a movie. Let me just look at the trailer…

Nope.

Nope nope nope.