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[Originally published in the February Issue, 18th of February 2026]
[SPOILER WARNING: Whalefall (Daniel Kraus), and The Employees (Olga Ravn)]
In December of 2025, I read two books that, although were very different in terms of prose and genre, were quite similar in terms of one specific plot device: the main characters are trapped somewhere, and death is fast approaching.
In Daniel Kraus’s 2023 novel Whalefall, this comes in the form of a literal sperm whale who swallows our main protagonist, Jay Gardiner. This book is filled with metaphors and the ghostly voice of a dead dad, but the threat is very real. Jay has an hour to escape the whale’s stomach, or die a horrific, suffocating death. Not only is Jay aware of this, but there are also multiple moments where he comes to accept his fate by lying and waiting in the whale’s stomach for death to take him. It’s only when the sperm whale (or his dead dad?) gives him encouragement to keep fighting.
Jay escapes from the whale, clinging to life, but alive, nonetheless.
Olga Ravn’s 2018 novella The Employees deploys a similar plot device but with a much larger cast of characters. Set on the interstellar spaceship called Six Thousand, where the human and humanoid crew start slowly going mad after bringing strange objects from a planet called New Discovery. Towards the end of the novella, it is decided that all Six Thousand, alongside its crew, must be terminated. For the humans, this means permanent death, but for the humanoids, this is a temporary death, as their consciousness and memories get transferred to a new body. The last few pages explore how the crew deals with their impending demise, knowing they are trapped on the ship, and realising they can never return home to Earth.
Once all the humans died, the remaining humanoids decide to “die” in the grassy fields of New Discovery, even if it means they’ll never be reuploaded into new bodies. In choosing between freedom (and death) and living (and entrapment), they choose the former.
After reading these two books, it got me thinking about other literary pieces with this plot device, and there were many that came to my mind. There’s Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (my favourite book), where Will Navidson is trapped for days in an impossibly large and dark labyrinth that’s hidden away in his home. In Ray Bradbury’s short story Kaleidoscope, astronauts are trapped free-floating in space, with the only way out is dying in a literal blaze of glory. Even two of my favourite video games, an indie horror game called No I’m Not a Human, and the iconic Five Nights at Freddy’s, explore this notion.
It’s unsurprising that this is a common trope in media. Humans, after all, are mostly afraid of two things: being trapped somewhere and death. It shows that when humans’ inevitable death is presented to them, they have a choice between fight or acceptance. In Whalefall, Jay is constantly battling between fight and acceptance, contrasting with The Employees, which is all acceptance. In House of Leaves, Navidson goes from fight to subtle acceptance. In No I’m Not a Human, it depends solely on which ending you get, and Five Nights at Freddy’s is all fight, baby.
It feels good to be back writing for Semper this year, and I’m excited to write more Lit Corners in the future! I haven’t decided on the theme for the next Lit Corner, but you’ll know it when you read it.
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