www.montereycountyweekly.com january 4-10, 2024 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY 17 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 A bestselling novelist chose Monastery Beach as the point of an unlikely diver-whale interaction. By Agata Pop˛eda “I like taking something inexplicable and maybe horrible, and then making sense of it.” Writer and filmmaker Daniel Kraus during his 2020 trip to Monterey, shortened by the coronavirus pandemic. Here, visiting Monastery Beach, the author of Whalefall is standing next to a danger sign. Courtesy of Daniel Krauss
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