Daniel Kraus | Signed First Editions

About Daniel Kraus

Daniel Kraus was born in Midland, Michigan, in 1975, although it was small-town Iowa that left the deeper mark on him as a writer. He has recalled watching Night of the Living Dead at the age of five, curled up beside his mother, and that early encounter with horror seems to have stuck. He studied at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, spent much of his twenties making independent films – including a documentary that was broadcast on PBS – and only later settled fully into fiction. Along the way he worked as a librarian and became the young readers’ editor at Booklist. That background is worth noting: Kraus has always had a good feel for books as objects, as well as for how stories are put together.

His first novel, The Monster Variations, appeared in 2009, but Rotters (2011) was the book that really announced him. A visceral tale of grave robbing in rural Iowa, it established Kraus as a writer quite prepared to get his hands dirty. The book made the Bram Stoker Award shortlist and earned him the first of two Odyssey Awards for audiobook narration. Scowler followed in 2013 and brought a second Odyssey. Then came the two-volume The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch (2015–16), named by Entertainment Weekly as one of its Top 10 Books of the Year. In 2022, his middle grade novel They Stole Our Hearts won a Bram Stoker Award, adding another rather different audience to his following.

Kraus has also formed some unusually interesting partnerships. With Guillermo del Toro, he co-wrote the novelisation of The Shape of Water, based on the same original story as del Toro’s Oscar-winning film, as well as Trollhunters, which became the Emmy-winning Netflix series. Following George A. Romero’s death, Kraus was given the job of completing several of the filmmaker’s unfinished works. The result included The Living Dead (2020) and Pay the Piper (2024), both unmistakably indebted to Romero’s particular brand of American horror.

Then there was Whalefall (2023), perhaps the book that most clearly showed just how far Kraus could stretch the boundaries of the genre. Its premise sounds almost too strange to work: a teenage diver searching for his father’s remains is swallowed by a sperm whale. Yet the novel attracted major attention, including a front-cover review in the New York Times Book Review, won the Alex Award and appeared on Best Books of the Year lists from the New York Times, NPR and Amazon. Kraus also co-wrote the screenplay for the forthcoming film, with Josh Brolin and Austin Abrams attached to star.

Angel Down followed in 2025, a World War I novel with a remarkable formal conceit: the entire book is written as one unbroken sentence. Set during the Meuse-Argonne offensive, it follows American soldiers who encounter something decidedly unnatural on the battlefield. The novel was named a New York Times Top 10 Book of 2025 and, in May 2026, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It was a striking moment for horror – and a considerable boost to Kraus’s readership beyond the genre’s usual boundaries.

Perhaps that is what makes Kraus particularly interesting as a collector’s author. He doesn’t seem especially interested in staying where readers expect him to stay. He has moved between horror, young adult and middle grade fiction, graphic novels, film and literary work, while returning again and again to mortality, grief and the things we would rather not see in the dark. There is a genuine sense of experimentation to the books, even when the subject matter is, at heart, very old-fashioned: fear, death, and what might be waiting for us just out of sight.