I'm Aisha Roscoe and this is the Sunday story. So I love horror fiction. It's my favorite genre. Anything with monsters or

zombies or dead people coming back to life, I'm into it. I also love a good thriller. So Daniel Kraus had been on my radar for a while.

He's a New York Times best-selling author who has written some pretty scary books.

When I heard he had a book coming out the summer called Wellfall,

I was intrigued, you know, I'm like,

what is this going to be about?

This book is, it's not necessarily horror

although the situation is horrific but it's definitely a thriller. If I wanted to sum it up I would say it's about a scuba diver who is

swallowed by a whale and he has to figure out how to escape before his oxygen runs out. That over-the-top premise was more than enough to draw me in.

But when you actually read the book, it's really about so much more.

It's about a father and a son and the legacies fathers leave behind. It's about what we carry with us and what we let go.

When I talked to Daniel Krause back in August, just as the book was coming out,

I got a sense of how significant this book was to him.

A whale fall in nature is a death of an incredible creature, a whale.

But then that death provides for many other life forms and it is a huge event in the ocean.

Daniel was wrestling with what it means to have a meaningful life and a meaningful death, a whale fall.

His sister was dying and he spoke openly about that.

Since our interview, she has passed away and I offer my deepest condolences to him and

his family. This conversation has stayed with me.

What does it mean to live a life that is worthy of a whale fall?

What does it mean to live a life that is worthy of the people we leave behind? Hey, it's Felix Contreras from NPR's All Latino Podcast.

I'm one of thousands of NPR Network Voices coming to you from over 200 local newsrooms across the country.

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