Daniel Kraus, the prolific Evanston novelist, best known for his many horror novels and high-profile collaborations with filmmakers such as Guillermo del Toro and George Romero, won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for fiction on Monday, for “Angel Down,” his stylishly audacious World War I novel, a tale of American soldiers trapped on a French battlefield who find an angel caught in barbed wire.
“I don’t even know what to say,” Kraus said from his Evanston home.
“I heard the way everyone heard, and I started getting texts and I thought at first I did something bad, then I thought someone was playing a joke. And now I’m just sort of beside myself.”
The Pulitzer committee described Kraus’s novel as “a breathless novel of World War I, a stylistic tour-de-force that blends such genres as allegory, magical realism and science fiction into a cohesive whole, told in a single sentence,” but it is much more likely to be categorized as horror.
Kraus has written and co-written a remarkable 31 books since 2009, including graphic novels and young-adult stories, two “Night of the Living Dead” books, and a pair of novels with del Toro (including “The Shape of Water,” the film version of which won the 2018 Academy Award for best picture). In general, though, Kraus’s books have been mainstays on horror shelves for years.
“It’s been a long and strange road,” he said, “and I guess what I appreciate is the people in publishing who stuck with me despite my switching up everything I do so often and creating chaos. I think my readers aren’t always aware of what I’m doing, or understood all the weird things I’ve done along the way, and this (Pulitzer) makes it feel like there’s been at least a point to all of this.”
As with “Angel Down” — which begins mid-sentence and occasionally resembles a long epic poem — the two Pulitzer runners-up for fiction were also formally unconventional. “Stag Dance: A Quartet,” by Torrey Peters, an Evanston-born, Chicago-raised writer, is a compendium of sorts, a novel and a trio of stories, all about gender. The other runner-up was “Audition” by Katie Kitamura, with a bold structure, the story of a lunch meeting between an actress and a young man who claims that she is his mother, told from competing sides of the table.
Evanston author falls into a whale! Lives to tell about it! (And then some!)
Indeed, Kraus’s previous work, “Whalefall,” a 2023 survival thriller, was told largely from the point of view of a narrator trapped inside of a whale’s stomach, attempting to escape and remember his diving lessons; a film version, co-produced by Brian Grazer with a screenplay cowritten by Kraus, opens in October. (“Angel Down,” which was also optioned by Grazer’s Imagine Entertainment, is already in development, with another screenplay written by Kraus.)
“I really am attracted to these kind of high-wire acts,” Kraus said.
It’s been quite a 2026 for him.
In March, he published “Partially Devoured: How ‘Night of the Living Dead’ Saved My Life,” a book-length essay about the meaning and influence of Romero’s 1968 horror classic. His next novel is already expected on June 23, “The Sixth Nik,” a sci-fi epic featuring a child with a tech-assisted brain, a spaceship created out of organic matter, a plague-infested planet and plastic surgery.
Before his Pulitzer Prize win, the most prestigious literary award that Kraus had received was a trio of Bram Stoker Awards for young-adult horror fiction. Kraus, who grew up in Iowa, moved to Chicago a couple of decades ago and attended the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
“I guess I’m feeling good and kind of stunned right now,” he said, “but also extremely grateful for this, since, of course, when it comes to my books, really nobody knows what to call them.”
cborrelli@chicagotribune.com
