Zach’s Reviews > Angel Down > Status Update

This is what happens when people read Blood Meridian *because* it’s the most violent book in the canon or whatever.

People who think this is a gripping war novel are after violence. Not that it’s the threat of relationships and personal dreams dying that makes war narratives so engrossing.

Why love Helm’s Deep? Battle of the Bastards? It’s not the violence. It’s what the violence defends.

“…Bagger’s scaling the ramp of a trench exit, out of dank sewage funk into a troposphere of hot ash that burns a cigarette cherry into his every bronchial.”

Every sentence! Clear and brilliant, then verbose and try-hard. Chekhov’s Advice: to make the reader feel something, restrain your prose. This has turned up every sentence to 11. But you end up not needing 3 of 5 sentences to get what’s going on.

a barbarian noise, lionlike in solipsistic bloodthirst, its shadow was swelling, widen black pool. And, boy it stings to have gotten so close to saving his own butt one last time. Stings even more that he failed to protect this woman’s breathtaking light. But at least Uncle Sam’s gone quiet, happy and satisfied at long, long last. And then so then but then it happens. A thing happens. A thing, it happens…

Yeah. I don’t like this at all. Don’t get the hype. I’m getting curious if you could just read “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” and get all you’d need.

I’d still look at Whalefall. Or maybe just watch the movie. But mix stream of conscious writing with McCarthy’s thesaurus and an Instagram poet’s sense of language, and you got Angel Down.

I’ll finish this—probably—but, boy do I not care about anything happening here. There’s not a likable character for miles.
The shrieker’s still shrieking.
The narration, undeniably skilled, is a too verbally extraordinary: tiring, overwrought.
Kraus is a good writer, though. I don’t know how to identify this, cuz I don’t care about his characters, but I he comes off as a genuinely likable author.

I genuinely can’t tell if I love or hate this. The language is beautiful and musical, but sometimes feels off. But I could be wrong. What is nice is a well-regarded novel that actually has a plot.