Daniel Kraus

The Martian meets 127 Hours in this “smart, surreal, and powerfully humane” (Owen King, New York Times bestselling author) 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 tenacles 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 “astoundingly great” (Gillian Flynn, 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.

A Novel

Whalefall

A good description on why closure is so elusive

Katheryn

Jay's not sure he believes in therapy. 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.

Principles: a nifty excuse for being an asshole

74 pages in and we're getting to the truly horrifying part of the story

Brick-red in actuality, midnight blue down here, Architeuthis is thirty-one feet lone from mantle fins to tentacle toes. Half a ton of gloppy flesh, floating in place, spreading like oil, its natural lights the glinting eclipses of a thousand moons. As it rotates, an eye rolls into view. The size of a soccer ball, it's the largest eyeball on Earth, a white disc of flame in the ocean black. 

Hewey called it "heiliger Schauer", the holy shiver of being caught in a predator's gaze. Said he saw it in dental patients from time to time. Jay like the phrase, a bratwurst mouthful; he and his buddies used it to reference bullies. Jay feels it now. He isn't shrimp, Architeuthis's food, and that's good. 

But that doesn't mean this thing likes him.

Man versus ocean. It’s not a fair fight. It never was.” 

“But his companion, his savior, his good luck charm, his best friend, it‘s lost inside the whale, gone forever…Just because Beaky’s remains are lost doesn’t mean he didn’t earn Jay’s grief.” 

“Fact: sperm whales sleep less than any mammal on Earth. 

Jay, son of Mitt, son of whale, will follow suit.” 

cloud

People aren’t doors. They’re whole floor plans, entire labyrinths, and the hard you try to escape, the more lost inside them you become.

Dive bros knew Mitt drank—hell, it was how you pumped the best stories from the guy's qut—but they didn't know he was a drunk, a periodic jailbird, a malcontent who couldn't hold a job more than a couple years and acted like it was a testament to his principles. 

Principles: a nifty excuse for being an asshole.

It holds the pose: a comma in a sentence so late only gods can read it. 

having fun and learning things. moby dick cannot relate!

Sperm whale clicks are the loudest sounds ever made by a living thing. 

Whalefall quotes

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