Whalefall

A Novel

By: Daniel Kraus

Narrated by: Kirby Heyborne

Soon to be a major motion picture from 20th Century Studios

A USA TODAY BESTSELLER

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Angel Down comes a 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.

Critic reviews

"Narrator Kirby Heyborne embodies the gruesomeness and terror and beauty in Daniel Kraus’s story. Listeners will feel its intensity in the pit of their stomachs. Teenage scuba diver Jay Gardiner is consumed by guilt as he seeks to find the remains of his father, who died by suicide, in the Pacific Ocean. As Jay searches the ocean’s depths, he is swallowed by a sperm whale. As the story switches between key moments in Jay’s past and the rapidly decreasing air in his tanks, listeners will feel like they themselves are gasping for air. Heyborne’s performance robustly expands Kraus’s tale, and it is divine."

great for scuba divers and fans of aquatic adventures!

I enjoyed this book for sure, but wow was the narration waaaaaaaaaaaaay off. far too serious far too intense, like someone whispering the plot of an adventure novel in your ear. really really really disliked that and it was extremely hard for me to finish because of it but I'm autistic as hell so who knows what's gonna trigger me.

what a great book!

there's so much detail in this book, and it morphs grnres multiple times. I loved it!

Surprising Depth (pun intended)

I expected a relatively superficial survival story, and I was impressed by the depth that Whalefall managed to achieve. This is a story about survival and escaping trauma. The metaphor of every moment Jay goes through connects brilliantly to his past, a tale weaved with such care that you imagine if this is really all happening or if this is Jay’s imagined experiences as he struggles to escape his past. The weaving of all life, land, and sea is beautiful. A well- researched story and brilliantly performed, I enjoyed this farm more than I thought I would.

Thalassophobia & Claustrophobia’s Meet Cute

Trigger Warning: This book will fuel your thalassophobic and claustrophobic nightmares simultaneously.

Take the impossible survival situation found within Andy Weir’s “The Martian” combined with the cloying, pressing horror of the alien digestion scene from Jordan Peele’s “Nope” - and place it under our terrestrial Pacific Ocean, tangled in the depth-probing hunting tentacles of a giant squid, within the acrid digestive gases of a sperm whale’s first of four stomachs. This is only the beginning of “Whalefall”.

A book concerning grief and the tribulations of its eventual acceptance, our own infinitesimal mortality, our lifelong familial correspondence and inevitable merging with all the beauty contained within the natural world, and a son’s relationship to his difficult and distant recently deceased father.

I absolutely loved this book. Props to Eva Anderson for discussing it in passing on The Doughboys Podcast. A podcast not even about books, but about chain restaurants.

Having lost my father at a young age, I found the book’s dissection of grief difficult at times, but ultimately rewarding and emotionally cathartic.

If you’re looking for a quick and horrifying read that will instill new or reinforce old fears and respect for the ocean, read “Whalefall”.

Not like anything I’ve ever read before

This book really took me by surprise. I thought it was maybe going to be a claustrophobic gross-out read - I was curious, but not in a hurry. After getting it for Christmas, I just meant to peek at the first few pages, and then I was just going to finish the first chapter, and the I couldn’t put it down. When I was too tired to keep my eyes open anymore, I bought the audiobook so I could keep going. And I did, all the way to the end. It was that compelling. It went deep, both literally and figuratively. I wasn’t expecting a journey through grief and broken familial relationships with a man in the guts of a whale, with any possibility of survival relying upon him coming to terms with his dead father. It’s intense and heartbreaking. It’s meaningfully introspective. And it’s claustrophobic, upsetting, and gross. I have absolutely zero idea if any of it is actually real, but if so, I also learned a bit about whale anatomy and behavior. I also have zero idea if being swallowed by a whale and spending a couple hours in its digestive tract is survivable. I’ll have to do a bit of a research deep dive and find out. I don’t really care either way - it was a ripping good story.