Angel Down (Pulitzer Prize Winner): A Novel - Couverture rigide

Kraus, Daniel

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 1668068451 ISBN 13 : 9781668068458

Editeur : Atria Books, 2025

Synopsis

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • NEW YORK TIMES TOP TEN BOOKS OF THE YEAR • USA TODAY BESTSELLER

The critically acclaimed author of the “crazily enjoyable” (The New York Times) Whalefall returns with an immersive, cinematic novel about five World War I soldiers who stumble upon a fallen angel that could hold the key to ending the war.

Private Cyril Bagger has managed to survive the unspeakable horrors of the Great War through his wits and deception. But his survival instincts are put to the ultimate test when he and four other grunts are given a deadly mission: venture into the perilous No Man’s Land to euthanize a wounded comrade.

What they find amid the ruined battlefield, however, is not a man in need of mercy but a fallen angel, seemingly struck down by artillery fire. This celestial being may hold the key to ending the brutal conflict, but only if the soldiers can suppress their individual desires and work together. As jealousy, greed, and paranoia take hold, the group is torn apart by their inner demons, threatening to turn their angelic encounter into a descent into hell.

Angel Down plunges you into the heart of World War I and weaves a polyphonic tale of survival, supernatural wonder, and moral conflict.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Daniel Kraus is a New York Times bestselling writer of novels, TV, and film. His novel Angel Down was the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winner, a New York Times Top 10 Book of the year, and a national bestseller. His novel Whalefall received a front-cover review in The New York Times Book Review, won the Alex Award, was an Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist, and was named a Best Book of Year by NPR, The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, and more. With Guillermo del Toro, he coauthored The Shape of Water, based on the same idea the two created for the Oscar-winning film. Also with del Toro, Kraus coauthored Trollhunters, which was adapted into the Emmy Award–winning Netflix series. He cowrote The Living Dead and Pay the Piper with legendary filmmaker George A. Romero. Kraus’s The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch was named one of Entertainment Weekly's Top 10 Books of the Year. Kraus has won the Bram Stoker Award, Scribe Award, two Odyssey Awards (for both Rotters and Scowler), and has appeared multiple times as Library Guild selections, and more. Kraus’s work has been translated into over twenty-five languages. He lives with his partner in Chicago. Visit him at DanielKraus.com.

Extrait. © Reproduit sur autorisation. Tous droits réservés.

Chapter I I
and Cyril Bagger considers himself lucky, he ought to be topped off, gone west, bumped, clicked it, pushing daisies, a new landowner, napooed, just plain dead, not only dead but scattered around in globs, for the last thing he saw was a shell dropping on top of him with the noise of colliding freight trains, a jim-dandy of a shot from Fritzy the Hun, and kind of ironic, seeing how the whole reason Bagger prefers burial duty is artillery shells can’t reach this far behind the frontline trench, but this shell sure did, the way he always pictures it in dreams, a red skull of fire screaming down, giving him one second to think, That old Bagger luck has finally run out,

and the afterlife, for the brief time he knew it, had been delectable, he was gentled back into the arms, and the long, long legs, of Marie-Louise, the prostituée on whom he’d lavished all his francs when the Butcher Birds of the 43rd had been stationed in Vosges, pretty, dry, warm, quiet, bloodless Vosges, where every inhale was Marie-Louise’s La Rose Jacqueminot parfum, her rosewater hair and periwinkle powders, every exhale the flutter of her dyed red hair and the lace whatchamacallits of her lingerie,

and so the last thing he wants is someone fucking with him and demanding, “You alive?,” to which Bagger responds, “Fuck no,” to which the man laughs mirthlessly and pulls him up by the armpits like a breech birth, so Bagger the newborn unseals his eyelids, a crust of mud, oil, and embarrassing tears, and discovers he’s being lifted from the burial pit he’d been digging when the mortar hit, now blown to triple its size and is stacked with triple the dead, all being sprayed with quicklime and hastily carpeted in soil,

and Bagger would have been buried alive if not for this sharp-eyed private, he really ought to reward him with a cigarette, but Bagger’s distracted by the corpses packed slick hot on all sides of him, one dead doughboy nearly beheaded by a pelvic bone, another who bit it collecting his intestines in one of his boots, a third stomped so flat by a shell that his spinal column protrudes from his gaping mouth,

and yet Bagger, by his own baffled accounting, is intact all the way down to his little piggies, so how the fuck is he alive when everyone who’d been near him, by the look of it, was exploded, shredded, and scattered, he tries to credit the corpse he’d been carrying, it must have absorbed the shrapnel, but a nagging voice insists it’s a miracle, which only pisses him off, he’ll be goddamned if he’s going to start believing in miracles here in hell,

and once his ass is on solid ground, more or less, he realizes this marshy patch of land between the Argonne Forest and River Meuse has fallen quiet, and there’s nothing more suspicious, a Western Front quiet is tetchy, one side always gets itchy and opts to bleed a few hundred more men over a few inches of land so ruined only a maniac would want it,

and so Bagger sits up with vision aswirl and shoos away the filthy pelt of air, the pigeon-gray smoke and eyeball-white fog, and beyond the hills of diarrheal mud and the pappy craters from whence those hills were upchucked, Bagger sees trucks and carts and wheeled guns crunching east, looks like the whole fucking U.S. First Army, III Corps, 43rd Division has vacated the scene with the likely exception of Bagger’s lowly Company P, forever dangled like a gonorrheal dick from the brigade’s leftmost flank,

and Bagger feels for his haversack, still there, and extracts his Bible, and opens it, and stuffs his nose into the gutter, and inhales, doesn’t give a fuck about kings and shepherds and carpenters and prophets, but the damp protean smell of the book’s red leather and the woody scratch of its onionskin pages, each one half-mooned by his father’s finger-stains, has a smelling-salt effect on Bagger, has since he was a kid, it brings him back to the cramped study over the church where Bishop Bernard Bagger labored on sermons, back when Cyril’s heart, now filled with smoke, was filled with what must have been hope,

and it’s only through the motions of inhaling that Bagger feels a brittle tightness, his face is glazed in dried blood, clearly not his own, and he orders himself not to imagine whose, it’s best when blood has no deeper meaning than rain, especially in the Argonne where so few trees remain to block the October wind that flash-dries blood so rapidly to your skin,

and while there’s no telling which boy bled this blood, what kind of blood is a different matter, fourteen days into this cyclone of cartilage and lead, Bagger has developed a sommelier palate for the tart fizz of brachial blood, the fudgy sorghum of femoral, the meaty sludge of heart wounds, the rancid reek of any gut juice at all, and the warm salt lick of arterial blood he now licks from his lips,

and it’s good the Bible is here to push him through it, Bagger takes a loud, greedy sniff, sinuses bathed in the aromatic nostalgia of comfort and solace, then reluctantly pockets the book and sticks fingers into his ear holes to clear out the creamy plugs of mud and blood, in this trenchworld hearing is so much more vital than seeing,

and the world’s noises whoosh back, and Bagger catches his breath at a rubbery wail that overrides everything, another minenwerfer dropping, the same kind of shell that ripped his fellow buriers to cutlets, oh no, oh shit, but hold on, wait, no, this is different, less a wail than a shriek, no rival to a minnie on a decibel level but with an edge that chisels through the end-times grumble at a pitch he’s never heard,

and though there’s plenty of attack machines in extremis out in No Man’s Land, their death moans are as predictable as hinges, while this shriek is organic, as alive as Marie-Louise’s pleased moans or Bishop Bagger’s stentorian damnations, it could be male or female, human or animal, but whatever it is, it’s dying, dying slow, dying loud, ripple after glissading ripple of agonized lament,

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,

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Atria Books
• Date d'édition: 2025
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1668068451
• ISBN 13: 9781668068458
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 304
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV; info@simonandschuster.nl; ; Herculesplein 96; Utrecht; 3584 AA; Pays-Bas