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Whalefall: A Novel Kindle Edition
Named a Best Book of 2023 by Book Riot, Shelf Awareness, and NPR
The Martian meets 127 Hours in this “astoundingly great” (Gillian Flynn, #1 New York Times bestselling author) and scientifically accurate thriller about a scuba diver who’s been swallowed by an eighty-foot, sixty-ton sperm whale and has only one hour to escape before his oxygen runs out.
Jay Gardiner has given himself a fool’s errand—to find the remains of his deceased father in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Monastery Beach. He knows it’s a long shot, but Jay feels it’s the only way for him to lift the weight of guilt he has carried since his dad’s death by suicide the previous year.
The dive begins well enough, but the sudden appearance of a giant squid puts Jay in very real jeopardy, made infinitely worse by the arrival of a sperm whale looking to feed. Suddenly, Jay is caught in the squid’s tentacles and drawn into the whale’s mouth where he is pulled into the first of its four stomachs. He quickly realizes he has only one hour before his oxygen tanks run out—one hour to defeat his demons and escape the belly of a whale.
Suspenseful and cinematic, Whalefall is an “powerfully humane” (Owen King, New York Times bestselling author) thriller about a young man who has given up on life…only to find a reason to live in the most dangerous and unlikely of places.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherMTV Books
- Publication dateAugust 8, 2023
- File size2364 KB
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“A crazy, and crazily enjoyable, beat-the-clock adventure story about fathers, sons, guilt and the mysteries of the sea . . . [Kraus] brings the rigor of a scientist and the sensibility of a poet to his descriptions of the undersea world.”—New York Times
“This gripping sci-fi thriller from bestseller Kraus takes readers quite literally into the belly of the beast […] Kraus provides solid nautical science alongside the stretchy coincidences that fuel Jay’s survival. Just on the brink of horror fiction, especially for the claustrophobic, Kraus’s deep-sea thrill ride will have readers on the edges of their seats.”—Publishers Weekly
"A moving character study disguised as a riveting, cinematic survival thriller...The pacing is relentless, the awe astounding, and the tension palpably constricting, even as Kraus takes time to provide necessary details both scientific and visceral."—Booklist, starred review
"This hard sci-fi thriller is full of cinematic and wild suspense and would be great for fans of Andy Weir."—Library Journal, starred review
“Picture Jack London, but with a more nuanced handling of broken, damaged men.”—Chicago Tribune
“One of the most intense — and moving — stories that will grace the bookstores in 2023…what Daniel Kraus has created here is something that can’t be quantified.”—Cemetery Dance
“An absolute triumph, a masterpiece of suspense, emotion, and flat-out terror…It’s one of this year’s can’t-miss books, and a journey you won’t soon forget.”—Paste Magazine
“Kraus turns the literal guts of this novel into a haunted house, a torture chamber, a church and a uterus for belated rebirth. There is nothing else quite like Whalefall.” —New Scientist
“A brutal, unsparing, wildly uplifting book. The sheer buoyancy had me breathless by the end.” -- Clay McLeod Chapman, author of Ghost Eaters and Wendell & Wild
“Astoundingly great. Whalefall is, quite simply, a beautiful novel—a must-read story of the sea, the nature of awe, and the briny relationships between fathers and sons.” -- Gillian Flynn, #1 New York Times bestselling author
“Brave, bold, epic, propulsive. Whalefall is a deeply moving thriller that holds a planet’s worth of hope in the pit of its stomach.” -- Joshua Ferris, National Book Award finalist
“The primordial nightmare at the core of Whalefall is fantastically gripping. A character study developed in the most intense crucible imaginable, Kraus’s latest novel is smart, surreal, and powerfully humane.” -- Owen King, New York Times bestselling author
"A masterpiece. I haven't felt so alive reading a book in a long, long time." -- Alissa Nutting, author of Made for Love and creator of the HBO Max series
“One of our oldest stories, one of our greatest fears, and one of our most capable writers. Stranger things than being swallowed by a whale have probably happened, but they've rarely been told so well.” -- Stephen Graham Jones, New York Times bestselling author
“Whalefall is a mind-blowing, take-your-breath-away adventure, but it’s also a tender and moving story of the relationship between a father and son. Daniel Kraus is a writer I greatly admire. He can do anything, and does.” -- Dan Chaon, National Book Award finalist and New York TImes bestselling author of Sleepwalk
“Unexpectedly emotional and wildly entertaining, Whalefall is the tense revamp of Jonah’s tale you didn’t know you needed." -- Gabino Iglesias, award-winning author of The Devil Takes You Home
About the Author
“A crazy, and crazily enjoyable, beat-the-clock adventure story about fathers, sons, guilt and the mysteries of the sea . . . [Kraus] brings the rigor of a scientist and the sensibility of a poet to his descriptions of the undersea world.”—New York Times
“This gripping sci-fi thriller from bestseller Kraus takes readers quite literally into the belly of the beast […] Kraus provides solid nautical science alongside the stretchy coincidences that fuel Jay’s survival. Just on the brink of horror fiction, especially for the claustrophobic, Kraus’s deep-sea thrill ride will have readers on the edges of their seats.”—Publishers Weekly
"A moving character study disguised as a riveting, cinematic survival thriller...The pacing is relentless, the awe astounding, and the tension palpably constricting, even as Kraus takes time to provide necessary details both scientific and visceral."—Booklist, starred review
"This hard sci-fi thriller is full of cinematic and wild suspense and would be great for fans of Andy Weir."—Library Journal, starred review
“Picture Jack London, but with a more nuanced handling of broken, damaged men.”—Chicago Tribune
“One of the most intense — and moving — stories that will grace the bookstores in 2023…what Daniel Kraus has created here is something that can’t be quantified.”—Cemetery Dance
“An absolute triumph, a masterpiece of suspense, emotion, and flat-out terror…It’s one of this year’s can’t-miss books, and a journey you won’t soon forget.”—Paste Magazine
“Kraus turns the literal guts of this novel into a haunted house, a torture chamber, a church and a uterus for belated rebirth. There is nothing else quite like Whalefall.” —New Scientist
“A brutal, unsparing, wildly uplifting book. The sheer buoyancy had me breathless by the end.” -- Clay McLeod Chapman, author of Ghost Eaters and Wendell & Wild
“Astoundingly great. Whalefall is, quite simply, a beautiful novel—a must-read story of the sea, the nature of awe, and the briny relationships between fathers and sons.” -- Gillian Flynn, #1 New York Times bestselling author
“Brave, bold, epic, propulsive. Whalefall is a deeply moving thriller that holds a planet’s worth of hope in the pit of its stomach.” -- Joshua Ferris, National Book Award finalist
“The primordial nightmare at the core of Whalefall is fantastically gripping. A character study developed in the most intense crucible imaginable, Kraus’s latest novel is smart, surreal, and powerfully humane.” -- Owen King, New York Times bestselling author
"A masterpiece. I haven't felt so alive reading a book in a long, long time." -- Alissa Nutting, author of Made for Love and creator of the HBO Max series
“One of our oldest stories, one of our greatest fears, and one of our most capable writers. Stranger things than being swallowed by a whale have probably happened, but they've rarely been told so well.” -- Stephen Graham Jones, New York Times bestselling author
“Whalefall is a mind-blowing, take-your-breath-away adventure, but it’s also a tender and moving story of the relationship between a father and son. Daniel Kraus is a writer I greatly admire. He can do anything, and does.” -- Dan Chaon, National Book Award finalist and New York TImes bestselling author of Sleepwalk
“Unexpectedly emotional and wildly entertaining, Whalefall is the tense revamp of Jonah’s tale you didn’t know you needed." -- Gabino Iglesias, award-winning author of The Devil Takes You Home
Product details
- ASIN : B0BHTQ3VG7
- Publisher : MTV Books (August 8, 2023)
- Publication date : August 8, 2023
- Language : English
- File size : 2364 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 332 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #60,455 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #238 in Hard Science Fiction (Kindle Store)
- #503 in Hard Science Fiction (Books)
- #731 in Science Fiction Adventure
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
DANIEL KRAUS is a New York Times bestselling author. He co-authored THE LIVING DEAD with legendary filmmaker George a. Romero. With Guillermo del Toro, he co-authored THE SHAPE OF WATER, based on the same idea the two created for the Oscar-winning film. Also with del Toro, Kraus co-authored TROLLHUNTERS, which was adapted into the Emmy-winning Netflix series. Kraus’s THE DEATH AND LIFE OF ZEBULON FINCH was named one of Entertainment Weekly‘s Top 10 Books of the Year, and he has won two Odyssey Awards (for both ROTTERS and SCOWLER) and has been a Library Guild selection, YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults, Bram Stoker finalist, and more.
Kraus’s work has been translated into over 25 languages. He lives with his wife in Chicago. Visit him at danielkraus.com.
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I wished it had gone full humor but the flashbacks, his memories of his relationship with his father are what fives emotion and depth to this novel. Great take on a biblical story with a very modern take. A story of grief and a father and son who never got each other but through a very unique event we find a new perspective on it.
It's one of those you need to experience more than hear about it. More of dealing with loss than an action-adventure blockbuster, entertaining one.
“Dying here is so much better than dying on land, where his pale, smelly corpse would be dressed and perfumed only to be mooned at by mourners out to avoid similar fates, before being plugged into overpriced soil, from which his best hope for immortality would be fossilization: a stone in a future museum, propped alongside other long-dead curiosities.”
There’s nothing original about a man getting eaten by a whale; we’ve had this story for nearly 3,000 years. The story of Jonah and the “great fish” (people back then probably didn’t know/didn’t care that a whale was technically a mammal) is a fundamental account in Islam, Judaism, and—by association—Christianity.
So Kraus didn’t invent or even reinvent the wheel. But I will say that I was pleasantly surprised—if not a bit underwhelmed—how realistic Whalefall was. It has a “true story” kind of mundanity about it. If I told my mom this had actually happened and had her read it, she’d believe it—hook, line, and sinker.
What is Whalefall about? Jay Gardiner goes looking for his father’s remains in Monastery Beach, which is a deadly area in Cali. Now, Jay and his father didn’t get along. His father was a free-spirit, hippy, let’s-save-the-fish type—that seemed to put that quest over his family (I’ll give Kraus props for avoiding “I hate my dad because he’s a MAGA Republican” trope). Especially his son. There’s resentment. Obviously.
So. Ocean. Diving. Squid. Uh oh. Whale. Oh? Ah. Pinocchio and Jonah, you get it.
Daniel Kraus is known for horror. And Whalefall could have been a balls-to-the-wall survival horror extravaganza. Just remix and amplify a few elements, and there you go. But Whalefall isn’t that. It’s more like… a Mitch Albom novel. It pulls—or tries to pull—at the reader’s heartstrings as we cut in and out of the whale and flashbacks between Jay and his father. The problem for me is that his father, Mitt Gardiner, didn’t have enough redeeming qualities; and Jay was too whiny and threw a pity party throughout; and the conclusion of his “hero’s journey” was self-deceptive and deflected any accountability for his own failures as a son.
Negatives out of the way, I did enjoy a very smart philosophical concept involving a junkyard flashback, the word “Sheol,” and the climax the novel (it takes a lot of themes from the Books of Jonah, and a little bit from the Passion story of Jesus on the cross); it’s actually quite intelligent. I respect it even more because Kraus doesn’t deliver it on a golden platter, nor does he brag or pat himself on the back and say, “look at me.” In fact, I didn’t even know he’d done what he’d done until I was on a 10 mile run two days after completing the novel.
That being said, Whalefall IS NOT Christian- or Jewish-leaning; it’s very New Age, very Zen, very naturalistic, very… Gen Z-ish (and Jay Gardiner definitely fits that trope, always blaming his father and never looking inward, which is why I never liked him—and he never had any kind of meaningful growth).
Whalefall is lukewarm. It’s… fine. It could’ve been a horror novel but wasn’t. It could’ve been a coming of age story but wasn’t. It could’ve been religious but wasn’t. It could’ve been political or preachy but wasn’t. In fact, he played too safe; it’s all things for all people but it doesn’t have an edginess that I was craving. A few smart and sneakily inserted philosophical ideas aside, it just felt… flat. Like, well… lukewarm coffee.
But it was easy to read, was smartly paced (though it did have some bloat in Act 2), and I never wanted to put it down.
“No one carries the best parts of themselves. The best parts are those held inside of others.”
The book is far more than a Jonah story because through the use of flashbacks we learn much about Jay’s troubled relationship with his father Mitt, also a diver, and his family. The reason for Jay’s dive that morning into Monterey Bay, an area I know well, is to find the bones of his dead father who committed suicide after a bout with cancer. And while in the whale, Jay reconciles with his late father.
I started reading this book on a long flight in a dark cabin over the Atlantic. It reached a point where the story was so terrifying that, in the darkness, I had to put it down. I didn’t finish until I returned home. All told, Knaus tells an adventure story with a strong human touch. Because there are 550 reviews already posted on Amazon, I have kept my review to a minimum.
Top reviews from other countries
I did not care for Jay and how he moved out of the home when he was fifteen, ignoring his dying father and withdrawing from his mother and sisters' presence and pleas. Flashbacks were too frequent, and I felt more forgiving toward his father than Jay did. It finally came to him that the many stories his father told him about diving and sea life might help save him, although, in the past, they never ceased to annoy and enrage him. He refused his family's plea to visit his father when the man was dying from a terminal disease, and his father killed himself by drowning.
I wished I had some knowledge of diving equipment, but I understood that Jay's was cheap and needed repair due to his father saving money. Jay decides to dive to try to retrieve some of his father's bones for burial, thinking this would improve his relationship with his family. His father had been a popular diver and storyteller, and his friends resented Jay's estrangement from him.
Once in the whale's belly, Jay hallucinates that the animal is speaking to him in his father's voice. Many of Jay's severe and life-threatening injuries were painfully described. Still, I wanted to learn the long-term outcome of his physical injuries, mental state, and whether he reunited with his remaining family members.
The book provided excellent information on the lives, deaths, and value of sea mammals, fish and molluscs and how human practices contribute to their decline. There were lots of thought-provoking and uncomfortable arguments for change and conservation. Despite some reservations, I thought this book was compelling and a success.