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Strolling into Evanston’s Reprise Coffee Roasters in a denim Polo shirt and Cubs hat, amiable Daniel Kraus doesn’t seem like a guy who excels at scaring the bejesus out of people. But the 51-year-old author cheerfully admits, “I really get excited by things that are disturbing.” He’s proved that across 30-odd books — perhaps most notably with his single-sentence World War I horror novel, Angel Down, which won the Pulitzer Prize in May. This predilection is also very much at play in Whalefall, his anxiety-inducing 2023 bestseller, soon to make a big splash in cinemas. Kraus wrote the screenplay with director Brian Duffield for the forthcoming 20th Century Studios adaptation.
Think Jaws plus 127 Hours: A young scuba diver (played by Austin Abrams from Euphoria) gets caught in the path of a charging ocean behemoth and ends up facing the same fate as Jonah and Pinocchio. A frantic struggle to escape ensues. For the film’s inside-the-whale sequences, the crew devised a series of faux stomachs the size of small tents, manipulated with ropes and pulleys “so they would be alive, moving and reacting,” Kraus explains.
The idea for the story came to him nearly six years ago at Jarvis Beach, not far from the Evanston home he shares with his wife. “I knew immediately, like I’d never known with any other project, that this idea tapped into something primordial,” he says. It sent him into a monthslong frenzy of research, including multiple consultations with a trio of cetacean scientists. “All three of them got into the challenge of it,” he says. “No one ever asks them, ‘How hot is it inside a whale’s stomach?’ ” With their help, Kraus crafted a version of an old fish story that, however unlikely, feasibly could happen in real life. “Sometimes I forget that other people’s boundaries with this kind of thing are smaller than mine,” he admits — with a sly smile.
Whalefall opens nationwide October 16.
Web Behrens is the contributing Go editor at Chicago magazine.
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