Gabino Iglesias Reviews Whalefall by Daniel Kraus
Whalefall, Daniel Kraus (MTV Books 978-1-66591-816-9, $27.99, 336pp, hc) August 2023. Cover by Will Staehle.
Daniel Kraus’s Whalefall straddles the line between science and science fiction and pulls readers into a world that is at once familiar and completely alien. As full of action and gore as it is packed with science and emotional turmoil, Whalefall is a superb reimagining of Jonah’s tale as well as a narrative that cements Kraus as one of the most creative and versatile voices in contemporary speculative fiction.
Jay Gardiner is haunted by his father’s memory. Jay’s father got very sick and killed himself, but Jay wasn’t around during his last days because their relationship had been strained for years. Now Jay thinks finding his father’s remains on the floor of the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Monastery Beach will give him the closure he craves and will help him change the way everyone looks at him.
Jay knows where his father jumped into the ocean, so he fills his pockets with batteries for extra weight and dives near the same spot and goes looking for his remains, which he plans to bring back in a bag. The dive goes well for a while, but then Jay finds himself near a very real monster from the ocean’s depths: a giant squid. The appearance of the giant squid puts Jay in danger, but the squid is more concerned with its own safety than it is with Jay. The giant squid has only one predator, the sperm whale, and before he has a chance to swim away, Jay, the giant squid, and the huge sperm whale chasing the squid encounter each other. A few moments later, Jay finds himself inside the first of the whale’s four stomachs. Injured, scared, short on equipment and options, and quickly running out of oxygen, Jay must use everything his father taught him in order to escape his fleshy prison.
Whalefall is incredibly engaging and tense. Also, with its combination of short chapters, nonstop action, and Kraus’s masterful use of line breaks, the book almost demands to be read in a single sitting, and the narrative always moves forward at the speed of a whale in the middle of a hunt.
This is a novel that, in Kraus’s capable hands, could’ve been great even if it only focused on Jay’s predicament. However, the narrative also has a strong emotional angle that shows readers Jay’s past and explores his relationship with his father and how it affected the way he engaged with the rest of his family and with the world at large. Climbing around the guts of a whale delivers enough gore, blood, and slime to satisfy readers of all kinds of horror, but what truly makes this novel shine is the way the science facts – all of them true except for the man inside the whale, which is somewhat plausible – and the main character’s emotions quickly morph into the driving forces that make this such a propulsive, gripping read.
Kraus showed he has a knack for mixing real science and science fiction in Wrath, a 2022 novel about a very intelligent rat he co-wrote with Sharon Moalem MD, PhD, an award-winning scientist and physician. That novel was great, but Whalefall, which in a way brings scientific research to the page wrapped in fiction, makes Wrath look like prototype. Whalefall is smart, informative, and packed with facts about the ocean and its creatures. However, all of that simply flows to the reader inside a story that’s also gruesome, bizarre, and ridiculously claustrophobic. The mix makes it a book I know I’ll be writing about again when the time comes to put together my list of best books of 2023.
Gabino Iglesias is a writer, journalist, professor, and book reviewer living in Austin TX. He is the author of Zero Saints and Coyote Songs and the editor of Both Sides. His work has been nominated to the Bram Stoker and Locus Awards and won the Wonderland Book Award for Best Novel in 2019. His short stories have appeared in a plethora of anthologies and his non-fiction has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and CrimeReads. His work has been published in five languages, optioned for film, and praised by authors as diverse as Roxane Gay, David Joy, Jerry Stahl, and Meg Gardiner. His reviews appear regularly in places like NPR, Publishers Weekly, the San Francisco Chronicle, Criminal Element, Mystery Tribune, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and other print and online venues. He’s been a juror for the Shirley Jackson Awards twice and has judged the PANK Big Book Contest, the Splatterpunk Awards, and the Newfound Prose Prize. He teaches creative writing at Southern New Hampshire University’s online MFA program. You can find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias.
This review and more like it in the November 2023 issue of Locus.
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