Mondays are Evanston-based author Daniel Kraus’ favorite day of the week. To the Pulitzer Prize winner, the day marks the start of a “new writing week.” 

“Writing is my absolute favorite thing to do. “If other people didn’t stop me, I would do it at night. I would do it on holidays,” Kraus said. “I mean, I do it on holidays, but I would go even wilder with it, like I would just be nonstop.”

Kraus has authored or co-authored a staggering 31 books since 2009, including young adult horror novel “Rotters” and thriller “Whalefall.” He is a horror writer — or a science fiction writer or a young adult writer, depending on which book is picked up first. 

Although Kraus has won various accolades and his 2025 novel “Angel Down” was tapped for The New York Times’ annual list of the best 10 books, he received perhaps his most significant recognition to date this year. 

In early May, “Angel Down” won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. It is the first horror novel to have done so since Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” in 2007.

Set during World War I, “Angel Down” follows five soldiers sent into no man’s land, where they find a fallen angel. The Pulitzer Prize committee described it as “a stylistic tour-de-force that blends such genres as allegory, magical realism and science fiction into a cohesive whole.”

However, Chicago-area librarian and horror reviewer Becky Spratford argues that she would consider “Angel Down” an example of the horror genre. 

Spratford has been reviewing Kraus’ works for years, she added. 

“This is a story about the horror of war, 100%. But it is also a story about the horror of humanity,” Spratford said. “It’s about our personal choices. It’s about our choices as a species. It’s about our connection to the higher powers out there.”

To Kraus, the book is less about World War I than war as a whole. Although the U.S. was not engaged in a conflict at the time of the novel’s conception, Kraus said he understood that the world is caught in an inescapable “cycle of industrialized warfare.” 

Because of this, Kraus structured the book as a loop, written as a single, uninterrupted sentence. 

“I knew that just because we weren’t in a war at that moment, that didn’t mean anything,” Kraus said. “War was coming as it always is. It always will be.”

What grows in Iowa

Long before he was on the Pulitzer Prize committee’s radar, Kraus was a kid in Fairfield, Iowa, writing novels and stowing them away in a drawer.

“That’s the best training I could have ever had,” Kraus said. “It created a unique style — I wasn’t sending something out and getting likes, figuring out what people like or don’t like. None of it was relevant. I was just writing it.”

Kraus said much of his work is set in Iowa, noting that it’s common for writers to return to their roots.

While Kraus said it might be easy to interpret his work as espousing “a very mixed feeling” about his home state, he has “unavoidable warmth and nostalgia towards certain things” from his youth. 

Still, he said the rural isolation of small-town Iowa has an inherently unsettling quality.

“I think the Midwest can be kind of scary,” Kraus said. “I’m talking about kind of the rural Midwest, where you’re just out there and the houses are so far apart, and so you might as well be boats, like little life rafts in an ocean … Anything at all could be going on outside those houses, and there’s no way for anyone to really know.”

Scott Slechta, who taught Kraus in high school and has known him for about 40 years, said the marks of Kraus’ upbringing in Iowa are visible throughout his work.

Even in high school, Kraus had a rare instinct for language and an interest in performance, Slechta said. He recalled a time when Kraus dramatized Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” for an advanced speech class — writing the script, drawing the storyboard and directing the production himself. 

“He just grooved on that,” Slechta said. “That was his mojo.”

Kraus was also a fixture in Fairfield’s theater scene, according to Slechta, playing the Artful Dodger in the musical “Oliver!”

In Kraus’ 2020 novel “Bent Heavens,” which he dedicated to Slechta and other Fairfield friends,  he wove in details from the production. 

“What’s really cool about Daniel’s writing is that Iowa and Fairfield and the high school and middle school permeate his writing,” Slechta said. “No one knows that unless you’re from Fairfield or you were in the high school or lived in Iowa, but that always is a foundation.”

Slechta said those that know appreciate the nod to Kraus’ roots. 

Kraus graduated from the University of Iowa in 1997. But it wasn’t until 2009 that he released his first novel. 

For a while, he worked as a documentary filmmaker and a freelance writer. When the dot-com bubble burst, magazines went away and took freelance opportunities with them, Kraus said. 

He returned to school at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign as a library and information science master’s student, worked briefly as a librarian and then joined the American Library Association, where he worked as an editor at Booklist for about a decade. While working full time, Kraus said he wrote about 10 books.

Working with legends

Over the course of his career, Kraus has collaborated with two of the horror genre’s most celebrated filmmakers — including one from beyond the grave. 

When George Romero, the director of “Night of the Living Dead,” died in 2017, his manager and widow went looking for someone to finish a zombie novel he had left unfinished.

They landed on Kraus.

Kraus called that decision “the greatest honor of (his) life.” Before he finished the manuscript, Kraus traveled to the University of Pittsburgh, where Horror Studies Collections Coordinator Ben Rubin oversees Romero’s archive. 

“It wasn’t just reading through George’s writing to understand his narrative voice,” Rubin said. “He would go down these rabbit holes of some scene that Romero had included that seemed kind of odd, and Dan would do all the research to figure out, ‘Well, why was this in here and what did it mean to him?’” 

Rubin would later also become the curator of Kraus’ literary archive at the university, to which the author continues to add.

Kraus has also collaborated with filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, who read “Rotters” and reached out to cowrite “Trollhunters” — which was later adapted into an Emmy-winning Netflix series. Later, Kraus pitched del Toro an idea that would become the movie “The Shape of Water.” 

It was an unusual arrangement, Kraus said, with del Toro making the movie while co-writing the novel with Kraus. He compared it to Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke’s tandem development of “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

Rubin said Kraus’ Pulitzer win helps legitimize the horror genre and underscores the importance of studying it.

“There is a reason it’s popular and people engage with it. It’s not just prurient. It’s not just the gore,” Rubin said. “There’s social and cultural value to the genre. There’s a reason we’ve been telling horror stories throughout human history.”

Out of the box

Spratford similarly stressed just how significant it is for the Pulitzer Board to recognize a work of genre fiction.

“This is a writer who has never, ever been defined, either by himself or the world, as a capital-L literary fiction writer,” Spratford said.

Although genre fiction like “The Road” has won previously, Spratford said there was an important distinction in that McCarthy was already viewed as part of the literary fiction circle. 

According to Spratford, Kraus worried his books would go unnoticed precisely because they resisted easy categorization. She recalled him telling her, again and again, “Becky, I wrote this great book — no one’s going to read it because it can’t fit in any box.”

Spratford said Kraus worried his books wouldn’t get out to the wider world. But the reception of “Angel Down” changed that.

The Pulitzer Prize was completely off Kraus’ radar when it was announced. He didn’t even know the announcement was happening. When the congratulatory texts started streaming in, he didn’t know what to make of them.

But that’s how it is for Kraus. Come Monday morning, he’ll be back at his desk. 

“To this day, it’s been really great to be able to write and then not care that much about this reception,”  Kraus said. “All I care about is the writing.”

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