A bestselling novelist chose Monastery Beach as the point of an unlikely diver-whale interaction.

IT’S A SUNNY NOVEMBER DAY ON HIGHWAY 1 BETWEEN CARMEL AND POINT LOBOS. Monastery Beach to the west serves as a natural billboard, announcing: The adventure starts here. Welcome to the kingdom of the ocean. The Carmelite Monastery on the east side of the highway seems to praise not the Christian god, but Okeanos – the total river floating around the world, according to the Greeks. In the oldest known representations from the 6th century B.C., Okeanos holds a snake in one hand and a fish in another. His eyes are the color of water in Monterey Bay.

Monastery Beach is as wild as it is serene. It has powerful waves and a treacherous bottom. It’s a steep beach, but it doesn’t look like one to the many families that stop their cars here, children charging toward wet turquoise that looks like a shimmering scarf from afar. It’s a legendary spot for divers, too, especially North Monastery Beach. But legendary also is the beach’s nickname – Mortuary Beach. At least 30 deaths have been recorded here; many more people have been rescued. This is the setting of Daniel Kraus’ novel Whalefall, published in August 2023, which became a New York Times and USA Today bestseller.

“There,” says Monterey wildlife cameraman and diver Connor Gallagher. His dark hair is speeding in one direction, with the wind. “Do you see the end of the kelp forest?”

He points at a distant washrock, where the ocean darkens. Kelp needs sunlight to grow, preferring shallower water. Therefore, there must be a serious, cold drop into open water where the kelp ends – deep into one of the fingers of the Monterey Submarine Canyon, the most studied submarine canyon in the world.

Monterey Canyon is similar in height, depth and width to the Grand Canyon in Arizona. Its steep walls measure over one mile from top to bottom. If Kraus’ story about a young diver swallowed by a sperm whale could happen, it could happen here.

“Carmel Canyon, a finger of Monterey Canyon, comes really close to the north here,” Gallagher says. He’s wearing shorts and flip-flops despite the 55-degree weather, which makes it a bit more believable that he dives in this cold, wild water. “The drop is 2,000 feet,” he continues. “It quickly can go even deeper.” That would be the point of interaction with the whale.

The interaction with the whale is an idea from the Bible and the idea central to a 2023 novel set right here, in this real place, where real people like Gallagher can imagine fiction actually happening.

DANIEL KRAUS LIVES IN CHICAGO. The body of his work counts 21 books, from graphic novels to young adult series and writing collaborations. Himself a director of six feature films, Kraus co-wrote The Living Dead with filmmaker George A. Romero. He worked alongside filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, co-writing a novel based on the 2017 movie The Shape of Water, after coming up with the idea for this Oscar-winning film. Children’s book Trollhunters, from 2015, was co-authored with del Toro and adapted into a Netflix animated series.

“I typically write horror, or something horror adjacent,” he says. “I like taking something inexplicable and maybe horrible, and then making sense of it.”

Whalefall fits the above definition, even though it’s a different kind of horror, a human horror of slow, claustrophobic death. That was the whole challenge of writing it – problem solving, down to the nitty-gritty of a hypothetical entrapment inside the largest toothed predator in the world. Jonah? Perhaps, but also David and Goliath. Also, it seems even less probable that a 17-year-old diver can quote from Dante’s Inferno, as Jay, the main character, does, than the possibility of being swallowed by a whale.

The protagonist, Jay Gardiner, is 17. After his abusive father dies, Jay’s mother and sisters start therapy, but Jay hasn’t shed a tear yet. That’s the problem – how to go through grief that is mixed with anger?

Instinctively, Jay organizes a dangerous and instant shock therapy for himself. He returns to Monterey, a place beloved by his father. There, his father taught him to dive. It was he who told Jay that when you die in the ocean, you bloat. He introduced him to John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row that he used to treat like the Bible.

Whalefall is a diver’s book, in many ways, with short chapters and technical language. Kraus confirms that many readers he met during a book tour were divers. “They said they couldn’t believe I’m not a diver,” Kraus says.

When Kraus started developing the plan for the book, his first concern was setting. “I wanted it to be somewhere in America,” he says. “That, right away, limited me to places where humans and sperm whales can easily interact.”

He was not worrying about the genre, and Whalefall fits a lot of categories – general fiction, a thriller, a horror, a mystery.

His first inclination was to make it as scientifically accurate as possible. Kraus started studying and talking to whale scientists and diving experts. He learned how to scuba dive in Lake Michigan, “one of the worst places to dive,” he says. “Murky and gloomy.” But he wanted to know how scuba diving equipment felt.

The experts he reached out to were excited. It was a new kind of challenge for them, too. Tom Mustill, who wrote the 2022 book How to Speak Whale, mentioned Conner Gallagher. Kraus reached out to see if Gallagher could do the actual dives off Monastery Beach and videotape them for book research.

“It was extremely helpful,” Kraus says. “It’s rare a novelist has an inch-by-inch record for the visual part of a work.”

They emailed back and forth about all sorts of stuff – physical limitations of the diver, time spent carrying a scuba tank. They both were surprised by the growing depth of their relationship.

GALLAGHER GREW UP IN VERMONT, the only New England state that doesn’t have access to the Atlantic. Fascinated by the ocean, he studied biology, then moved to Southern California to teach marine science. “That opened my mind to the kelp forest and ecologies and species of the Pacific,” he says. “I started to film everything I could see underwater.”

In 2015, Gallagher moved to Monterey. His goal was always combining his love for science and the ocean with the world of media. He succeeded; he works locally and other times is away from home for weeks or months at a time. He read the first draft of Whalefall during an 11-week trip to Antarctica, where he was hired by the BBC and Netflix to film a documentary.

He was working on a film project in Monterey when he heard that a Chicago-based author was writing a book about a scuba diver swallowed by a whale.

“It was kind of ridiculous, but then I realized he wrote The Shape of Water,” Gallagher says, referring to the 2017 movie by del Toro, a masterful creator of meeting points between human and inhuman, such as Pan’s Labyrinth (2006). Like Whalefall, The Shape of Water is a story of deep water and what it hides, and a possibility to connect with it.

Gallagher figured that while it’s physically impossible for a diver to be swallowed by a whale, Kraus is an expert when it comes to fantasy that melds with human reality.

“I love that kind of stuff so I started to think,” Gallagher says, “OK, if that happened, how would that be possible?”

IT SEEMS IMPROBABLE, maybe not as much as being swallowed by a whale, but rare – a writer typing in his place in Chicago and a Monterey diver, united in creating a story that reworks a biblical motif. Just like Jonah, the Whalefall’s main character is being swallowed to be saved – Jonah from a terrible ocean storm sent by God, Jay from his grief. They both will find their way out and become better people. Biblical or not, a diver and the mechanics of the adventure are as important as the biblical source it relies on.

Kraus came to Monterey himself, driving all around to see the lay of the land and take videos. He videotaped the exact path Jay takes, parking in secret, going for a risky dive. He passed the Bay School Parent Co-Op Preschool, taking the Carmel Meadows Trailhead through the forest and popping out on North Monastery Beach, the very far end. He looked at warning signs all over – “Danger, intermittent waves of unusual size and force.”

Between this video and Gallagher’s videos, he mapped out the first third of the book, with scenery recognizable to anyone familiar with the Carmel-area coast (read an excerpt on p. 18). They worked on the Whalefall project for a couple of years. It took Kraus only five months to write it; the rest was research. Gallagher dove to 100 feet under the surface, and his observations are part of Jay’s fictional world.

But let’s go even deeper. There’s the whole emotional level of the story in the novel. It’s not just a diver’s book. There’s a reason why the novel starts with a quote from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick.

There’s the whole line of male authors’ books about the ocean, the eternal battle of man against a monstrous, wild mother, but also the ultimate Mother, Christian Mary, invoked in ancient times as the Star of the Sea.

Being inside of the primordial ocean is like sitting in a mother’s belly. And isn’t sitting inside the whale, undigested, kind of like sitting in a womb? But in Whalefall, the whale symbolizes the father and Jay is sitting inside his belly. After experiencing a horror of survival and emotions related to it, he is being born again – this time by his father and thanks to skills he never appreciated. Jay wants to talk to his dead father; he wants to talk to god. And Kraus believes the ocean is the gigantic force of the planet that is closest to god. You want to see god? Go to the ocean.

“He has to stomach the whole thing,” Kraus says, referring to the death of Jay’s father. “When he’s finally out, he’s nourished by the skill set he received from his father.” More skills than he assumed.

Accordingly, the whale in the novel is not like the shark in Jaws, Kraus explains. “The whale is not a ‘bad guy,’ just a big, peaceful, benevolent creature,” he says.