Title: Whalefall
Author: Daniel Kraus
Publisher: MTV Books
Publication date: August 8, 2023
Length: 336 pages
Genre: Contemporary fiction
Source: Purchased
Rating:

I can promise you that you’ve never read a book like Whalefall before! I’ve seen some comparisons to The Martian, and that’s pretty fair… more on that below!

In Whalefall, our protagonist is 17-year-old Jay, a teen wracked by guilt over his fractured relationship with his deceased father. Mitt Gardiner was revered in the Monterey dive community, but as a father, he inspired fear in his son. Mitt’s focus was 100% on the ocean and its mysteries, but his fury at the encroachment of humans and his dissatisfaction with daily life made him a man whose anger and bitterness cost him job after job.

While Jay’s older sisters were mostly immune to Mitt’s moods, Jay spent all his life as the focus of Mitt’s obsessions, forced out on dives from a young age, forced to parrot back Mitt’s teachings and support his ill-thought-out pipe dreams and get-rich-quick schemes. After a terrible confrontation, Jay left home and spent the last years of his father’s life, as Mitt deteriorated due to mesothelioma, living with friends and refusing to see his father.

We learn about Jay’s history and the torturous relationship with Mitt through flashback chapters, interwoven with the “now” of Jay’s story. As the book opens, Jay is heading for Monastery Beach, a dangerous area on Monterey Bay, to search for his father’s remains. Preferring to die at sea than in a hospital bed, Mitt committed suicide there by throwing himself off a boat while loaded down with dive weights. Jay has convinced himself that if he can retrieve Mitt’s bones from the Bay’s floor, he’ll find some sort of peace or redemption.

He definitely doesn’t believe in closure. People aren’t doors. They’re whole floor plans, entire labyrinths, and the harder you try to escape, the more lost inside them you become.

Using shoddy, second-hand gear, Jay heads into the water, at first allowing himself to marvel at the undersea world and its beauty, his father’s words echoing in his mind. Disaster strikes soon enough: Jay ventures across the edge of an undersea canyon that leads to true depths, is awed by the sight of a giant squid, and realizes too late that the squid is being hunted by a sperm whale. Caught up in the squid’s tentacles, Jay is pulled into the whale’s mouth, and then swallowed.

As the chapter headings show us, Jay’s oxygen tank will sustain him for no more than an hour. As each chapter passes, we see the tank’s readings decrease. He’s in a seemingly hopeless situation — how could a small human possibly manage to escape from a whale’s belly? And yet, Jay looks around and determines not to give up… at least, not until he has to.

As the situation deteriorates, and possibly due to the dangerous levels of nitrogen and methane, Jay begins to hear his father’s voice. Is it real? Is it in his mind? Is the whale channeling Mitt? Doesn’t matter — this voice reminds him again and again of incidents from his past, and through these memories, Jay is given hints of knowledge that he can use.

Depending only on what he has with him, as well as the weird flotsam floating in the whale’s stomach, Jay begins to fight a seemingly unwinnable battle to save himself. And little by little, as his father’s voice guides him, Jay begins to find an inner peace with his past as well.

The descriptions in Whalefall are brutal and terrifying. Jay’s body goes through unimaginable degrees of punishment, from acid burns to bone-breaking compression due to the whale’s stomach’s peristalsis, to the painful pressure damage caused by the whale’s sudden dive for the depths. Readers with weak stomachs and/or an inclination toward claustrophobia might want to think twice before starting this book!

So how is the story of a teen inside a whale similar to The Martian, the story of an astronaut stranded on Mars? In both cases, a person in an apparently hopeless, fatal situation finds a way to survive through science, knowledge, and a McGyver-ish ability to take what he has and use it to his advantage. For Jay, that means using neoprene, a squid’s beak, Brillo pads, batteries, and more to create tools, first aid supplies, and other devices necessary to last just a little bit longer and try to find a way out before his air is gone.

While a harrowing tale of danger and escape, Whalefall is also a deeper story of love, regret, and the complicated power of parent-child expectations and disappointments. Mitt is not a nice guy by any means, yet it’s his presence that enables Jay to survive, and as we learn through Jay’s memories, there are kernels of value buried deep in Jay’s subconscious that let him see that life with Mitt wasn’t only the nightmare he remembers.

I first heard about Whalefall thanks to Tammy at Books, Bones & Buffy, who featured it months ago as a Future Fiction pick. Thank you, Tammy! Don’t miss her review, here.

Whalefall is a tense, addictive read that’s impossible to put down once started. I did wish to know more about what happens next at the end, even though I recognize that that’s not the point of the story. (Can’t help that I’m super practical and curious…)

I’m so glad that I decided to read Whalefall. I loved the Monterey setting, the references to Steinbeck, the glimpses of lives devoted to the sea, and the depiction of the power and mystery of whales and other deep-dwelling creature. More than anything, this story of survival and desperation is a look inside a young man’s pain, longing, and regret, and these elements — the personal and the thriller — come together to make a compelling whole. Highly recommended.