The following version of this book was used to create this guide: Kraus, Daniel. Angel Down. Atria Books, 2025.

Cyril Bagger is an American infantryman fighting in the Argonne during World War I, a practiced swindler who survives by bending rules and ducking danger. When an inhuman shriek begins rising from No Man’s Land and shattering the nerves of the men, Major General Lyon Reis demands that the source be found and silenced. Bagger joins a small patrol that includes the young runner Lewis Arno, the intense Ben Veck, the brutal Popkin, and the devout Corporal Goodspeed. Expecting a German weapon or a wounded enemy, they crawl through shell craters under flares and machine-gun fire until they find the “shriek” itself: a luminous young woman lying injured in a crater, wingless yet unmistakably unnatural.

The patrol drags the woman from the mud and tries to keep her hidden as the fighting churns around them. Her presence changes the men’s bodies and minds in ways that feel like miracles. Wounds close, fear softens, and the woman’s face seems to shift, offering each soldier a private vision of the person he most longs for. Goodspeed sees the girl he loves, Veck sees his daughter Naomi, Arno sees his mother, and Bagger finds himself haunted by Marie-Louise, the lost love he has never stopped trying to save. The men begin calling the woman an angel, and they begin to believe she can grant wishes, but they cannot agree on what she is or what they owe her.

Bagger’s first plan is simple: get the angel back to Reis and collect whatever reward or protection it brings. Yet the journey through the ruined forest is a gauntlet of gas, patrols, and mechanized slaughter that breaks the patrol apart. In one chaotic encounter with armor, Goodspeed is torn in half and dies in the mud, and the others are left with only each other, their fear, and the angel’s unsettling calm. Veck grows more desperate and fixated on using the angel to end the war. Popkin’s hunger turns predatory, and he begins looking at the angel as property.

Popkin finally betrays them. He knocks Bagger out, stabs Arno in the neck, and kidnaps the angel in a stolen ambulance, intending to keep her for himself. Bagger pursues him to an abandoned stone house where Popkin strips the angel and tries to assault her. Bagger attacks, and in the fight Popkin is crushed when a wall collapses. Bagger rescues the angel and pushes onward through the shattered landscape. Veck catches up and tries to force the angel into a single, decisive act that will stop the war. Instead, she confronts him with terrifying displays that make the battlefield feel endless and inescapable, and Veck sacrifices himself in a fiery detonation that consumes him.

After Veck’s death, the angel begins speaking to Bagger with a clarity that makes her presence even more unnerving. Believing Arno is lost, Bagger makes his own wish, asking for Arno to be brought back. The angel grants it, reviving Arno and returning him to Bagger, but she also binds Bagger to a condition: he must promise never to take another human life, and if he breaks that promise a catastrophe beyond imagination will consume the world. Bagger accepts, and he and Arno, newly alive and fiercely loyal, continue toward Reis with the angel.

They reach Reis’s command dugout and present the angel to him. Reis immediately claims her, renames her Minerva, and tests her power by demanding the impossible. He asks her to restore the arm he lost, and the angel grants the wish in agonizing detail as a new arm grows from his stump. Reis’s triumph turns into ambition. He imagines using Minerva to win the war, reshape the front, and secure his own glory, and he keeps her under guard while the fighting worsens outside.

When a German assault crashes down on the position, Bagger and Arno force their way back into the dugout to take the angel away. Reis attacks them with brutal strength, beating Arno and crushing Bagger’s hand and face. Bagger finds Reis’s pistol and, caught between his vow and Arno’s life, raises it. At that instant the angel freezes time, halting the collapsing roof, the battle above, and every man mid-motion. She pulls Bagger through a hidden fold in the sky and shows him visions that turn his memories into a landscape. He stands again in his father’s church, sees the Bible image of the Madonna that resembles the angel’s dress and cape, and is forced to confront how the war’s violence has been built into him. She then carries him through a nightmare of the world’s depths, where an engine grinds the dead into bullets and the future unfolds as a chain of new wars.

Returned to the dugout as time resumes, Bagger chooses Arno and shoots Reis, breaking his promise. The dugout collapses and then cracks open again, and the angel leads Arno away as if to claim him. Bagger tries to bargain by offering his own life in exchange, but the angel refuses to change the deal. When Bagger attempts suicide, she stops the bullet in midair and cradles it as if it is precious. She walks into No Man’s Land, buries the saved bullet like a seed, and Bagger sees a rushing vision of decades passing and of himself as an old man returning to a towering tree grown from that planted bullet. Back in the crater, the angel convulses and transforms into a monstrous, winged figure and ascends into the sky as the battle rages below, leaving Bagger and Arno to face what survives after her departure.