A Pulitzer, a movie, and two mind-melting new horror books — best year ever?

From Pulitzer Prize Winner to Sci-Fi Horror: Daniel Kraus Talks “The Sixth Nik” and His Unstoppable Creative Drive

Daniel Kraus is a name that resonates with literary excellence, having recently won the prestigious Pulitzer Prize for his novel “Angel Down.” But Kraus isn’t one to rest on his laurels. He’s a whirlwind of creativity, constantly pushing boundaries and exploring new genres. In May, he secured the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for “Angel Down,” a supernatural WWI survival story told across a single novel-length sentence. By June, he had published “The Sixth Nik,” a speculative science fiction horror odyssey that makes “Event Horizon” look like “Bluey.” This was just one of two books he released in three months – he also published “Partially Devoured,” a minute-by-minute critical breakdown of “The Night of the Living Dead.” And if that wasn’t enough, his movie “Whalefall” is slated for release in October.

A Career Defined by Range

For a writer who already boasts over 20 novels to his name, this convergence of projects and accolades might seem almost absurd. Kraus has worked with Guillermo del Toro on “The Shape of Water” and drawn inspiration from George A. Romero’s notes for “The Living Dead.” He’s explored horror, historical fiction, YA adventures, comics, and now screenplays, with a creature feature currently in the works.

His latest offering, “The Sixth Nik,” is a mind-bending sci-fi horror novel that showcases his unique ability to blend genres and push boundaries. The story follows Sissalla, a 9-year-old empath cyborg raised by Inuit tribes to accomplish an impossible task. Aboard a living spaceship made of flesh, she embarks on a journey with a crew including a peyote-addicted doctor and an assassin named Murder 005, navigating space to confront a group of human defectors who have taken residence on a planet with metal oceans. Along the way, they must navigate “The Snarl,” a dystopian version of the internet that’s eight times more chaotic than 8chan.

In this exclusive interview, Kraus delves into his astonishing year, the creative process behind it all, and what lies ahead. He reveals how he balances multiple projects, why he constantly reinvents himself, and the inspiration behind “The Sixth Nik.” As he emphasizes, he’s just getting started on a quest to explore every facet of creativity.

Polygon: Most authors can’t pull off what you’ve accomplished — you can’t be contained in a lane. Maybe it’s the industry? You’ve worked in middle-grade fiction, you’ve written non-fiction and film commentary, you’ve dabbled in every genre even if you’re “known” now for horror.

Daniel Kraus: I think it makes commercial sense not to. It doesn’t matter if your thing is sci-fi or fantasy or literary fiction. It makes good sense to stick to what you’re known for. And that goes hand in hand with the fact that that’s what most people want to do. Most people have a happy place, and that’s where they want to keep working.

What is your happy place?

My happy place is the opposite of whatever I just wrote. That’s how I operate. Not just genre. It has to do with tone and style and perspective and point of view, right down to granular stuff. If I just did something with long, dense chapters, I want the next thing to have short chapters, short sentences, and a more chopped-up structure. I don’t want it to be anything like what I’ve last written. I don’t know exactly where that comes from, but that’s how I read and watch movies, too. I don’t ever binge stuff. I want to watch the opposite of what I’ve just watched and read the opposite.

Compare now to the beginning of your career: What’s the bigger rush, finally publishing your first book or winning the frickin’ Pulitzer Prize?

The Pulitzer thing is hard to get a hold on, because all these other things are kind of semi in my control: what I decide to write, where I decide to work, and what kind of things I decide to do. But something like that prize just comes out of left field. It’s like getting hit by a meteor. You have to run into the field to get hit by the meteor.

You had to run into the field to get hit by the meteor.

It’s true: I had to do the work to get out there. But it’s really a bolt from the blue, and anytime something like that happens, there’s definitely skill involved, but there are a million points of luck and the right people reading the book. I think that I will one day be very happy about it. In the short term, it has put so much more onto an already overcrowded plate that I haven’t really had time to see it as anything but this kind of monster that has eaten my life. But I know it’s a great honor […] I don’t expect it to really have any impact on the work, which fits into my career, where I’ve never really let anything dictate what I’ve done, for better but also for worse. It’s definitely been both. But that’s just the way I