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No matter how tumultuous of a relationship you might have with your parents, never forget the valuable advice they may have given you along the way.
That’s one of the life (and death) lessons character Jay Gardiner discovers in the gripping novel Whalefall by prolific author Daniel Kraus, which is being made into a movie by 20th Century Fox.
Kraus visited the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus in November of 2024 to discuss Whalefall with moderator Ryan Ross, the director of history and traditions programs at the UI Alumni Association and senior editor of Illinois Alumni magazine. Kraus earned a master’s degree in library and information science in the School of Information Sciences in 2005.
In the novel, the 17-year-old Jay attempts to locate the remains of his deceased dad, Mitt, in the Pacific Ocean, an effort he hopes will ease the guilt he feels over his father’s suicide. The dive goes awry when Jay becomes entangled in the tentacles of a giant squid, which itself is being stalked as prey by a sperm whale. Jay finds himself sucked into the whale’s stomach – the first stomach of four within the beast – and has one hour to escape before the oxygen in his tank runs out. The fast-paced action scenes intermix with Jay’s flashbacks, thoughts that conjure the clumsy but well-meaning advice from father to son and assist Jay during his perilous time in the whale.
“It’s what Daniel does with the idea as well as his beautifully vivid descriptions of ocean life, and his skill in milking suspense out of the situation, that make this a special book,” Ross told the audience at the start of the event.
Whalefall was inspired by a viral video Kraus heard about in which a person was in the mouth of a whale, though headlines about this news inaccurately said the individual was swallowed. Themes in Whalefall, which takes place during the pandemic, include processing grief and arriving at forgiveness. At its harshest, Whalefall draws forth feelings of discouragement some people might feel in not having the type of parent – or even child – they want.
Mitt was an overbearing father, according to Kraus, but the lessons he taught his son on how to survive on the ocean helped Jay when he was in the guts of a whale. Those lessons, the author said, were Mitt’s way of showing love.
“It was a flawed way, but it was how he was trying to do it, the best way he could do at the time with his limited emotional vocabulary,” Kraus said.
To make Whalefall come across as plausible, Kraus spent three months talking to scientists, whale experts, and scuba divers. He even learned how to scuba dive himself to get a feel for what the activity is like. The author’s meticulous research was “a process of working backwards,” he said, to figure out how the story was going to end.
Kraus, who loves doing research for his books, said Whalefall was carefully outlined because every second Jay was inside the whale had to be accounted for. The scientists Kraus talked to were thrilled to answer his questions because they had never before contemplated the inquiries on how a person might escape from the belly of a whale. The experts made sure to frequently tell Kraus they were offering him their best guesses since they weren’t aware of any humans ever having been inside a whale.
Ross, who read Whalefall three times prior to his discussion with Kraus, said one of the best aspects of the book was how Jay, a character he called a “teenage MacGyver,” uses the limited objects within the whale, such as an indigestible beak of a giant squid, as tools to plot his escape. Kraus wanted Whalefall to be a page-turner that put readers “in the physical state of the main character.”
Similar to the movie Castaway with Tom Hanks, the action in Whalefall involves just one person in a remote setting. Like Hanks’ character, who becomes deeply attached to a volleyball, Jay forms an attachment to the squid’s helpful beak.
Apollo 13 from 1995 was another movie Kraus drew inspiration from, specifically the scene in which the NASA contingent in Houston was asked to formulate a jumble of parts into a working device that would save the astronauts hurtling through space in a deteriorating capsule. Kraus said the isolation and “unfathomable darkness” of being trapped within the innards of a whale is comparable to what the Apollo 13 astronauts experienced.
There were touching moments during the conversation. Kraus explained that the term “whalefall” is the process that occurs when a dead whale’s carcass falls to the ocean floor and provides “a shockwave of life for generations, hundreds of years” thanks to the mammal’s massive food source and how that affects the ocean’s ecosystem for decades.
“One of the greatest metaphors I’ve ever run across,” said Kraus, a former documentary filmmaker who said he gets goosebumps when discussing whalefall. “How one person’s death can impact generations. I thought that was just wonderful.”
The talk turned even more poignant when Kraus revealed that his sister, Jane, passed away during the week Whalefall was released in 2023. Her demise was more sudden than expected and brought out further the acuteness in Kraus’s mind of a whalefall effect.
“We’re all Jane’s whalefall,” Kraus told the people who attended his sister’s funeral. “She just died, and we’re all here. We’ve all been affected by it. There’s something really kind of beautiful about that.”
Kraus is an unapologetically multi-genre author who has written almost every type of fictional book except a western, and even that type of read is coming soon from the Chicago resident. An “omnivorous” reader and writer by his own account, Kraus enjoys everything from romance books to thrillers, calling himself an “agent’s nightmare” because of his diverse output. Kraus’s brand is having no brand, a style he believes frees him up creatively and generates more readers in the long run.
Within all of Kraus’s books, however, is an element of horror, a genre he has had a soft spot for since the days he was bullied in school.
“I turned to horror for, I think, armor to sort of make myself comfortable in a way,” Kraus said. “Maybe the bullies in school were bigger, but they couldn’t watch what I watched.”
When an audience member asked Kraus at the end of the session how he grew into the life of a writer after truly making it, and about his writing process, the author didn’t hold back.
“To some extent, I thought I could do this while I was in middle school,” Kraus said.
The most important thing he’s done as a writer, Kraus explained, has been to maintain the pattern he established back in middle school, when he would write a story, feel satisfied about what he had written, and then simply put the work in a drawer. The process imprinted into Kraus’s mind just how fun writing was to him, and how it was a creative outlet for his eyes only.
The separation between what Kraus has written over the years and any reactions to his work has kept him going, he said. When he releases a novel today, the event and any subsequent promotion and reviews are the most uninteresting parts of his career to him.
“I’m still just sort of living in this little happy castle where I’m just happy with all my stuff. I think that’s a really good way to work,” he said.
Kraus writes in a matter-of-fact way, working a solid eight hours a day like a 9-to-5 job and writing anywhere he finds himself (home, airport, or on an airplane). For years he wrote seven days a week and was finally convinced to take Sundays off. Kraus said he would write every single day of the year and during the evenings if he could, but he realizes his passion for writing has veered toward an unhealthy state and has taken a toll on certain areas of his life.
“I love writing so much that it has been to some deficit of other life,” he said. “I’ve lost time for people. I’ve got this sort of tunnel vision in a way that is really good if you want to write a lot of books, but I need other hobbies.”
Read my Q&A with Daniel Kraus for Smile Politely, “Getting into the belly of author Daniel Kraus.”