Wow! What a ride.
Everyone loved Mitt Gardiner, a crusty, self-reliant, friendly deep-sea diver with a reputation as one of the best. Everyone except his son, Jay, who only experienced him as a callous bully driven to force Jay into being a clone of himself. Jay fled home at 15 to escape Mitt, and stayed away as his father wasted away from cancer until throwing himself into the ocean to die. Now, 17-year-old Jay is hoping to get back into his family's good graces by retrieving his dad's bones from the bottom of Monterey Bay with a secret, possibly illegal, very dangerous dive, his first one in two years. It becomes an unimaginable experience.
Readers experience the wild thrill ride with Jay, as much about the emotional tumult as the physical happenings. Jay has the amazing luck of stumbling upon an Architeuthis, a giant squid, a one-in-a-million, unique encounter. But the squid is being hunted by a sperm whale, and Jay gets eaten right along with it. In the tight, dark whale's stomach, burned by digestive acids, halfway delirious from breathing methane, an undigested squid beak stabs through his hand. But he can use the beak to cut part of his neoprene diving suit into a bandage that will keep him from bleeding out. And to stab into the whale in the hopes it will regurgitate him. But the pain makes the whale dive in a panic, and Jay is going to be crushed from the water pressure. Then the whale suddenly stops, just in time to save Jay's life. Except it stopped because it's being attacked by a pod of orcas and will soon be killed and eaten. Back and forth, one incredible thing after another. Constant adrenaline and thrills. An emotional roller coaster.
Kraus is often a writer of the macabre and grotesque, and he spares no gory detail here. This book resembles Moby-Dick in its attention to the minutia of whale anatomy, except this is much grungier. Jay spends a good portion of the story in a fleshy tube that is trying to crush him, surrounded by blood and viscera of the whale's other victims; Jay's surroundings during other portions are just as gruesome. The writing is, indeed, visceral and vivid.
While these events are playing out, the real drama is taking place inside Jay's brain. He has knowledge that will help him survive, but to access it he must process his accumulated trauma, guilt, repressed memories, and tumultuous relationship with his dad. As much of the book takes place in the past as the present; Jay's journey into the dark depths is as much psychological as physical, and he has many monsters to fight.
This is an amazing tale in so many ways. Can't-put-down excitement combined with emotional rawness and honesty. Unique and fantastic.