WARNING: Pulitzer Prize Winner Angel Down Not About Depressed Stripper

This reviewer, like many readers. Takes a passing interest in those few books every year, chosen for the honor of the Pulitzer Prize. Past winners include such amazing books as, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Grapes of Wrath, and A Confederacy of Dunces. None of which may mind you has this reviewer read. So you can imagine my surprise when this year's winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction was a horror novel titled Angel Down. A novel which we all naturally assumed, was about a down-on-her-luck stripper with a heart of gold.

So you can imagine my surprise when not only does this novel not take place in a seedy strip club. But instead takes place in the trenches of World War I. An odd choice, I thought. But the more I thought about it, the idea of strippers fighting Germans in the trenches seemed more than worthy of a Pulitzer.

But the more I read, the clearer it became. We had all been lied to. As for whether this misnomer is intentional, it’s impossible to say. However, it’s clear that what this novel is selling, is not what's delivered. This isn’t to say that the rest of the story is bad per se. The actual story of Angel Down is a fast-paced account of a private who encounters an injured Judeo-Christian style angel on the battlefield. This is where my confusion lies. The actual story of Angel Down is an interesting and compelling narrative. However, I found myself fully unable to enjoy it, after having the much more interesting story of the stripper dangled in front of my face.

Were this book to have been honest from the jump, I believe it still would have been an amazing work of fiction. But this needless bait and switch left me feeling trapped in the world of the novel, longing for the much more interesting tale originally offered.

For any readers out there who may have come to this book looking for some sort of sexual gratification, all is not lost. Author Daniel Kraus, in a bold stylistic choice, writes the entirety of Angel Down in a single sentence. In what can only be described as a form of Edging through prose. If through a divine miracle this review finds its way to Daniel Kraus, we here at The Associated Jest highly encourage a sequel that actually fulfills the promises of its predecessor.