altlovesbooks

Ick.

Okay, so this ended up being way more general fiction than it was either horror (unless you count body horror) or thriller. I think I was expecting something way different than what I was delivered, and while the story told isn’t bad exactly, I get kind of bored with stories involving people working through childhood trauma. Even if that story is told inside the (literal) belly of a whale.

Jay has daddy issues. His father was a lover of the sea, a diver who also took on unpleasant jobs to pay the bills for his large family. Has a big attitude problem, and looks down on anyone who doesn’t view the sea and everything in her the same way he does, including his own son. He expected Jay to follow in his footsteps and become a diver, an activist, a lover of the sea in his own right, and the two grew apart when Jay didn’t want any of that for himself. (Ending spoilers here) Then his father dies, a suicide off his friend’s boat, and Jay feels compelled to retrieve his father’s underwater remains in an attempt to heal the rift in the family that the two of them left behind. He becomes a whale snack, and the rest of the book is him trying to get out of this whale, while also hearing the voice of his dead father and working through all the issues the two of them had with each other.

This one’s more literary than I was expecting, and the pacing is incredibly slow for what it is. While in the belly of the whale, we’re treated to flashbacks in Jay’s life that further defines the relationship between him and his father, interspersed with very short segments about his attempts to get out of the whale. See, the whale just seems like a metaphor for the grief and guilt Jay carries around with him surrounding his father and Jay leaving home, and while I’m sure there’s something there for people that appeals to, I was here for whale science and “holy shit I’m swallowed by a whale, what do??”

There’s also a ton of visceral body horror, both in Jay and in the whale, leaving me queasy a number of times as I envisioned “Beaky” in his hand, being slowly dissolved by stomach acid, and various other injuries sustained while on his weird physical-and-mental journey.

So, like, it’s a fine book, but just not for me. I made it through out of stubbornness, but it didn’t feel like a rewarding slog through whale stomach contents.

I’m going to keep this brief because nothing I can say can really do this book justice. It’s very short (~150 pages), but I kept having to put it down because the writing was so powerful, the stories so sad, and the subject matter so heavy. The book follows a small group of unconnected people (a housewife and her kids, a religious man, a couple doctors, a female plant worker) who had the terrible luck of being within the blast of Hiroshima’s atomic bomb. What they were doing up to the bomb’s detonation, what life was like immediately afterward, and the more long term effects they all suffered from.

It's heartbreaking and pulls no punches. There’s very vivid descriptions of burns, lesions, amputations, infections, and other expected medical effects, which serve to highlight how terrible the whole situation was.

This gets all my stars for the year.