Whalefall

Whalefall (2023) is a survival thriller by Daniel Kraus. Known for writing both conventional novels and graphic novels and for collaborating filmmakers, he has co-authored the New York Times best-selling The Shape of Water with Guillermo del Toro, and he was hired to finish the late George A. Romero’s novel, The Living Dead. In Whalefall, a guilt-ridden 17-year-old son undertakes a dangerous and irrational solo dive to recover his estranged father’s remains, but his mission is violently interrupted when he is swallowed alive by a sperm whale. The novel explores themes such as The Bitter Lessons of a Father’s Harsh Love, The Sublime Indifference of the Natural World, and The Quest for Closure, Atonement, and Redemption. The narrative is grounded in the marine biology of Monterey Bay, California, and engages with the American literary sea-story tradition by referencing Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) and John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row (1945).

This guide refers to the 2023 MTV Books/Atria Books edition.

Content Warning: The source text and this guide contain depictions of death by suicide, emotional abuse, addiction, graphic violence, and death.

Plot Summary

Seventeen-year-old Jay Gardiner drives to Monastery Beach, one year after the death by suicide of his estranged and abusive father, Mitt Gardiner, who will always be a legend in the local diving community. Haunted by guilt over his decision not to support his family during Mitt’s battle with terminal cancer, Jay now plans a dangerous solo dive, irrationally determined to recover his father’s remains from the site where Mitt died. He hopes that this bold act will bring closure to his mother, Zara, and to his older sisters, Nan and Eva. He also hopes to restore his own tarnished reputation in the local diving community. He is frustrated and mystified to find the beach crowded with vehicles from NOAA and the Coast Guard, and he must go out of his way enter the water covertly.

Jay’s real-time experiences on this particular morning are alternated with flashbacks that reveal glimpses of his difficult childhood, in which he was often the sole target of criticism, pressure, and ridicule from his father, Mitt Gardiner. To the outside world, Mitt was a volatile local diver who hopped from one meager job to the next. Although he was admired in the local diving community, only his family knew the true extent of his emotional abuse, his erratic work ethic, and his struggles with alcohol addiction. Most of his abuse was reserved for Jay, whom he saw as the child who was destined to carry on his diving legacy and his love of the sea.

As Jay grew up, Mitt relentlessly drilled him on obscure diving lore and criticized every misstep, fostering a deep sense of anxiety, hypervigilance, and inadequacy in his son. Jay’s only sources of warmth were his mother, his sisters, and Mitt’s best friend, Hewey. The festering, years-long conflict between father and son finally culminated when Jay was 15. After the failure of Mitt’s latest business venture, a drunken Mitt threatened Jay while the two were isolated on his rickety boat. When Mitt tried to force Jay to engage in a ritualistic form of self-mutilation, Jay fought back and escaped by jumping overboard.

In the aftermath of this violent encounter, he left home for good, ignoring the pleas of his mother and sisters, as well as his father’s entreaty that Jay not “break” his “heart.” Two years later, Jay learned that Mitt had been diagnosed with terminal mesothelioma, but despite his family’s pleas, Jay refused to visit his dying father. Unbeknownst to Jay, Mitt eventually had Hewey take him out on a rowboat off Monastery Beach, a notoriously treacherous diving location, where he drowned himself with dive weights. Jay’s ongoing absence in the middle of these events deepened the rift with his family and made him an outcast in the local diving community.

Now, motivated by a need for redemption, Jay prepares for his solo dive off Monastery Beach, using old, secondhand gear. Determined to recover Mitt’s lost bones, he improvises dive weights using D batteries and carries a mesh bag with an unreliable “suicide clip”—so called because it is notorious for endangering divers by refusing to open at inopportune moments. Jay ignores his better judgment and enters the treacherous surf of Monastery Beach, battling the powerful undertow and a thick kelp forest to reach the deeper waters where he believes his father’s body must lie. Following coordinates provided by Hewey, he descends along the rocky seabed, searching for any sign of human remains. Finding nothing, he follows a trail of starfish to the edge of the immense, mile-deep Monterey Canyon.

After spending time exploring the precipice and noting the fading of the light as he descends, Jay is dazzled by the bioluminescence of a rare giant squid, mere feet away from him. However, his awe is cut short by the arrival of a massive sperm whale that rises from the deeper reaches of the canyon to hunt the squid. The whale’s powerful echolocation clicks disorient Jay, and he is caught in the suction that forms as the whale opens its mouth to feed. Despite a desperate struggle to escape, he is pulled into the whale’s toothy maw and swallowed alongside the frantic squid.

Awakening inside the whale’s first stomach chamber, Jay barely manages to survive an attack from the dying squid, which mistakes his wetsuit for whale flesh and inflicts a deep wound on his neck. Trapped in the dark, muscular sac, Jay is nearly crushed by the stomach’s peristaltic contractions and begins to suffer from methane poisoning and a rapidly dwindling air supply. Judging that the only way out is through, he determinedly moves into the second stomach chamber despite “hearing” a disembodied voice warning him away. Once there, he finds a highly acidic environment filled with indigestible, razor-sharp squid beaks from the whale’s previous kills. He sustains severe acid burns, and his hand is impaled by a beak that remains embedded in his flesh.

Realizing that he cannot escape through the whale’s digestive tract, he returns to the first stomach chamber and realizes that the wound in his neck is bleeding profusely. He uses the squid beak to cut a piece of neoprene from his diving hood to create a makeshift bandage for his neck wound. He then uses his remaining fin to brace the stomach walls, preventing himself from being crushed.

Hoping to induce vomiting, Jay stabs the stomach lining with the beak, but once again the disembodied voice calls out in warning, and Jay’s plan backfires when the whale, overcome by pain and fear, dives deep into the canyon, subjecting Jay to immense water pressure that nearly kills him. As the whale bottoms out, it is attacked by a pod of orcas. The whale is mortally wounded, but Jay encourages it, initiating an internal dialogue with a sentient presence that he identifies as both the whale and his father’s spirit.

Jay urges this sentience to send out a distress call, and when the whale calls out, a pod of female sperm whales answers, forming a defensive “marguerite” formation that eventually drives off the orcas.

The pod escorts the dying whale as it slowly ascends. Jay, now severely injured, decides to climb out through the esophagus. He uses a dead helmet jellyfish’s flickering bioluminescence as a flashlight and painstakingly makes his way up the gullet. At the top, he discovers the whale’s larynx, and he manipulates a vocal fold to make the whale emit a piercing, unnatural cry. The sound alerts the people on a nearby boat, but before they can act, the whale reflexively swallows a school of fish, and Jay is washed back down into the stomach, his legs broken.

With less than 400 psi of air remaining, Jay accepts his fate and prepares for a “whale fall,” the process by which a whale carcass sinks to the ocean floor, where its rotting flesh creates a new ecosystem. However, in a final surge of determination fueled by lessons from his other sister, Eva, a chemical engineering student, Jay makes one last, desperate plan. He realizes that the stomach is filled with flammable methane gas, so he cuts a hole in the stomach wall with the squid beak, shoves his air tank’s valve through the opening to supply oxygen, and uses a steel wool pad and a 9-volt battery from his BCD pocket to create a spark. The resulting explosion rips a hole in the whale’s abdomen, blowing his hand to smithereens in the process.

Jay is blown into the whale’s body cavity and fights his way through ruptured organs, but he becomes trapped behind the whale’s massive heart. In a final, frenzied act, Jay tears through the heart muscle itself, creating an opening to the outside world. Rescuers from a nearby crew of scientists and Coast Guard personnel pull him from the carcass (They had already been present to examine the corpse of a nearby beached whale.)

Catastrophically injured, Jay sees the pod of sperm whales offshore, their spouts raised in a salute. He understands that although he did not find his father’s physical remains, he has become his father’s living legacy. The novel closes with Mitt’s familiar morning cry, “Sleeper, arise!”—and this rallying call is recontextualized not as a command, but as an invitation for Jay to embrace a new life.