I saw the trailer for the 2026 Whalefall film while attending a showing of Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. Intrigued, but not incredibly compelled, I pocketed it for later and moved on. Then, as I'm sure many did, I saw the new Resident Evil film and itched for a bit more Austin Abrams. This film is out of theatres here in the PNW, and frankly I anticipated the horror elements (which are HEAVILY featured in the marketing) to be a bit much for me without preamble. Ergo: a well-reviewed book in a genre I love, at a time in my life with an abundance of energy for good stories.
This book took me two sittings. One where I had to get up early the next day, so cutting myself off at midnight seemed the intelligent option, and the other where I was free to feel like a teenager again, reading in a dim lamplight and the refractions from the streetlamps outside.
I was expecting a grittier survival horror novel: something I enjoy and was expecting to voraciously consume the book over. What kept me going, however, was not that.
Jay Gardiner is seventeen. Ran away from home at fifteen. He was born in the early months of 2005, and lives on the coast of California. His father, a proud man, died a few months previous. Suicide, after a battle with cancer that Jay ran from acknowledging. His last words to his father were from the duo's final straw, an event that Jay returned home from sopping wet after a 1/4 mile swim, beginning to pack his bags.
I don't know that, in the six years after the COVID pandemic's insurgence, I have read a book truly about it. Not about the virus, but about someone who was kept from life by it. This detail is only peripheral in Whalefall, but endlessly important to me. Jay remarks, later on in the novel, that parts of his life (sexuality, specifically) have been made hard to explore by the pandemic. His consistent grapple with masculinity throughout -- the relationship he has to crying, showing weakness -- reflects back on him through this whale, a creature grown so old its vocal folds can no longer make that sound of anguish.
(I never promised my ramblings on this book would be anything close to comprehensible. If you're on my blog you know what you're in for.)
The whale, in swallowing him, forces Jay to confront his grief. He's surrounded by it, lit in bioluminescence and the radiating pulses of a dying jellyfish. The sound of his father's voice tells him what to do, through memory and through the blurry obscurity of present. This book wasn't horror, not to me. It was barely unreal.
In being swallowed, Jay heals, but he is not the only one. I struggled to come to terms with his conclusion, for a little while, burdened by my own projections. I thought that his acknowledgement of his vision being "shuttered" was invalidating of his own trauma. Until I reexamined a bit, came to terms with the fact that Mitt changed too.
He can't be forgiven, he isn't. But he's made peace with.
I still disagree with fathers having sons to hold them accountable, on a foundational level. But what I do agree with is Jay's fight. His subconscious drive to find a reason, a rationalization, for his father's attempt at apology, at bonding. For the first time, his father is asking him about his life. If he has a girlfriend. Boyfriend.
Jay doesn't hold Mitt accountable in the sense of a parallel road, a friend who is there to ensure you don't go off the deep end. He was a child, that wasn't his job. He is still a child. He was holding Mitt accountable in the way that his return was the only way that Mitt made peace. All of the items were there: exactly what he needed to survive. And a block of cement in the mouth of a whale, a last-ditch attempt to sink to the bottom and be forgotten.
The whale, his father, gives Jay permission to break his heart. To bite through it in animal fervor, and come out the other side changed. He shifts his plea, the telephone-gamed "Don't break my heart." into something exposing of them both. He gives Jay permission to blow it all up behind him, in an ending that could have easily come across as cheap or unfitting, but was balanced with just enough surreal tension to mimic perfectly the oxygen loss and euphoric haze of living.
Mitt Gardiner was unkind. He was callous. He was a father so obsessed with his work, with helping everyone else, that he neglected taking on the weight required to properly parent his son. And he died as such. But it's more complicated than that, and Jay's search for redemption in his community quickly turns to a fight for survival. And then a realization that, with that survival, he is bringing his father back with him.
"(Where are you)
The right answer was so simple, Jay had fought it.
Ayekah. Hineini.
I am here."
Whalefall, Daniel Kraus. 0.
Needless to say I enjoyed this book. It hit me in ways I don't think one has in... I don't know. It's been a while. I had to earnestly take a break to scream into my pillow, and that is a real treat to feel. I look forward to seeing the movie, when I can. I hope it makes me feel this way again.
