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The Full-Moon Whaling Chronicles
Nominated for 2024 Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry Association's Elgin Award • One of the Globe 100's Best Books of 2023
The follow-up to Guriel's NYT New & Noteworthy Forgotten Work is a mashup of Moby-Dick, The Lord of the Rings, Byron, cyberpunk, Swamp Thing, Teen Wolf . . . and more.
It’s 2070. Newfoundland has vanished, Tokyo is a new Venice, and many people have retreated to “bonsai housing”: hives that compress matter in a world that’s losing ground to rising tides. Enter Kaye, an English literature student searching for the reclusive author of a YA classic—a beloved novel about teenage werewolves sailing to a fabled sea monster’s nest. Kaye’s quest will intersect with obsessive fan subcultures, corporate conspiracies, flying gondolas, an anthropomorphic stove, and the molecular limits of reality itself. Set in the same world as Guriel’s acclaimed Forgotten Work, which the New York Times called “unlikely, audacious, and ingenious," and written in rhyming couplets, The Full-Moon Whaling Chronicles cuts between Kaye’s quest, chapters from the YA novel, and guerilla works of fanfic in a visionary verse novel destined to draw its own cult following.
The follow-up to Guriel's NYT New & Noteworthy Forgotten Work is a mashup of Moby-Dick, The Lord of the Rings, Byron, cyberpunk, Swamp Thing, Teen Wolf . . . and more.
It’s 2070. Newfoundland has vanished, Tokyo is a new Venice, and many people have retreated to “bonsai housing”: hives that compress matter in a world that’s losing ground to rising tides. Enter Kaye, an English literature student searching for the reclusive author of a YA classic—a beloved novel about teenage werewolves sailing to a fabled sea monster’s nest. Kaye’s quest will intersect with obsessive fan subcultures, corporate conspiracies, flying gondolas, an anthropomorphic stove, and the molecular limits of reality itself. Set in the same world as Guriel’s acclaimed Forgotten Work, which the New York Times called “unlikely, audacious, and ingenious," and written in rhyming couplets, The Full-Moon Whaling Chronicles cuts between Kaye’s quest, chapters from the YA novel, and guerilla works of fanfic in a visionary verse novel destined to draw its own cult following.
397 pages, Kindle Edition
First published August 1, 2023
13 people are currently reading
266 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
July 27, 2023
I love CanLit and poetry so I was very excited to read THE FULL-MOON WHALING CHRONICLES by Jason Guriel. I enjoyed this novel! I loved the unique writing style. This entire verse novel is told in rhyming couplets. I loved how meta this book is. It centres around the book The Full-Moon Whaling Chronicles by Mandy Fiction. The book has a logo on the spine for Churn Press, a windmill, which is just like Biblioasis. The setting is 2070, there’s New Toronto and the main character, Kaye, travels to Tokyo where people live in tiny “bonsai housing”. This novel is set in the same world as Guriel’s previous verse novel Forgotten Work but this one works as a stand alone. I liked how this dystopian story is an epic quest for book lovers.
Thank you to Biblioasis Books for my advance review copy!
Thank you to Biblioasis Books for my advance review copy!
March 19, 2025
Found myself thoroughly enjoying the story within a story that wound and weaved unto itself to one unified plot. I adored Guriel's daring imagined view of 2070, a future that felt no need to explain its advanced technology that was more silly than anything else.
March 14, 2024
Jason Guriel has a habit of starting the actual plot more than halfway into the book. It worked a bit for Forgotten Work but here it meant the last 100 pages happened in a really confusing quick paced mess of an ending. It was cool I guess but I don’t know if it was strictly necessary (and with two epilogues we still somehow didn’t wrap up Kaye’s plot line at all).
August 5, 2025
So. The Full-moon Whaling Chronicles is, first, the name of the book you’re handling, and, then, the name of the book within the book—A YA classic about teenage werewolves stealing a ship to return a giant whale’s eggs—and, finally, the name of an epic poem composed at the end of this book, which happens to start with the twenty or so lines with which both the book you’re holding and the book within the book commence. ‘Lines’, because the whole thing is composed in heroic couplets.
Both the Book You’re Handling and the Eponymous Book Within The Book are prone to periphrasis: both in terms of, ten lines will tell you something that could be done in five; also in terms of, this story takes a long time to get to the point. The b.y.h., which is set in a dystopian medium futre, starts with a section focalised around a girl named Cat, introducing her life in the new Montreal, which is in a crater after a terraforming missile hit it: her home situation, her mum’s new boyfriend who she quite likes actually, her discovery—though not the point where she starts reading—the e.b.w.t.b.; in the second, she’s taking her skeptical best friend to a convention; this friend, Kaye, is the central figure of the third frame section, years having passed, she’s now in college; in the fourth, she arrives in Japan, where she’s to be assistant to a professor taking leave in the search for Mandy Fiction, author of the e.b.w.t.b. This is the end of the first of three parts; it’s also, effectively, the start of the plot. In the e.b.w.t.b. Chronicles we start with a general description of the werewolf whaler town; the second section, mirroring the b.y.h., has a fakeout protagonist, introducing Dot, a teen werewolf, who sees a ship eaten by a giant whale; her friend Paige will actually be the central figure. What forward momentum is arrived at by part two is swiftly dissipated as we start getting fanfic AU versions of the e.b.w.t.b., where the wolves are in space, or trees, or humans piloting wolf-shaped mechs.
Unclear why this YA title is the classic of this setting. Possibly we are meant to be assuming that the sketched-in characters we meet are given the dissertation-length surveys of their trivial inner selves that seem to characterise the blockbusters of that genre. (I’m not a YA fan but I don’t believe, on the evidence, that Guriel is either.) It’s also look-ma-no-hands weird-and-wacky in a way which might be intended as genuinely compelling or might be a joke about how weird some YA settings are; either way it doesn’t land. There’s a set of final revelations about the whale which make sense on the level of the SF b.y.h. Chronicles but not the YA fantasy e.b.w.t.b. one. The whole action of the YA e.b.w.t.b.: wolf teens see a ship eaten by a giant whale; they talk to a local shapeshifting eccentric about the last time this happened; deducing the giant whale is angry at her eggs being stolen, they set out on a junky ship to return them; they are attacked by pirates and escape, succeeding on their mission, realising the shapeshifting eccentric and the giant whale are, in fact, one species. This is about enough event for a longish short story. Now, in about twice this page count Milton justified God to Man, though to be fair he didn’t have to rhyme while he did it.
I’m unfamiliar with Guriel’s previous work, though I gather there’s a previous book in heroic couplets which shares a setting with the b.y.h. here. A couple of LitHub pieces he wrote around that one centre on a fairly classic hot take, the old ‘isn’t-Don Juan-more-radical/fulfilling/difficult than-The Cantos. I don’t have a position on that; I’ve never finished either. What one does find, reading Byron or Pound, though, is that they are capable of lines of extraordinary beauty, and of good jokes. On the evidence of 381 pages Guriel has neither.
Regarding the beauty, or its lack, I suspect Guriel could point to a tendency to allow femine endings to stretch the metre, going back to the Elizabethans, which would justify ‘tavern’, but the second line seems to role that into something entirely trochaic. ‘La’s’ and ‘paws’ do not rhyme, though this might be excused in a North American; I also found myself having to consciously sound out ‘buoy’ each of the hundred or so times it was deployed. Regarding the comedy, or its lack: yes, they’re whalers, we get it, very droll; except then Guriel explains the joke.
(I thought we were, as a culture, over thinking the La’s were any good. Anyway, do you find it funny that people say ‘pre-zuck’ for ‘before the online world’, or ‘onzuck’ instead of ‘online’, or ‘ZuckTube’ for ‘YouTube’? Go with god.)
What’s the heroic couplet doing here? well, it’s not being used directly as epic; nor is it being used exactly as mock-epic; it seems to have been a form Guriel just found permitted him to express his narrative at length, and with digression, as Byron did with rhyme royal, was it? in Don Juan. The diction is modern in ways that I’m not sure work. Guriel doesn’t allow himself poetic inversion or elision, though a certain amount of light syntactic rearrangement: Paige wraps a rope around her paws “As if she were self-bandaging with gauze” before the one extended action scene, where is she “gut-kicked”; since I’ve been watching Buffy lately it reminded me of the Whedon writing tic where a line is considered 20% more amusing if you get ‘slayage’ or ‘kissage’ into it instead of ‘kill’ or ‘kiss’. There’s a lot of enjambment, which sometimes seems comic—
—and sometimes just lazy:
Here Kaye has gone from a millionaire’s miniature reproduction of the world of the e.b.w.t.b Chronicles to another millionaire’s nanotech reproduction of same, as, remember, the e.b.w.t.b. comes to contain within it another version of the text: it’s like poetry, it rhymes. Some of this stuff I might get hyped for, I suppose, if I didn’t find the foot-by-foot movement so plodding. You have my apologies for that one.
—
Why is Kaye’s dad’s cancer introduced for a total of, I think, one page of angst? What exactly happened to the corporate drama? Who thinks a verse-paragraph of theoretical titles of academic papers about a made-up book is funny? Why do we visit the question of the sex organs of vampire bats three times? What’s with the glibly-handled sexual peril in the pirate attack, and is Byron somehow to blame for that? Did we need to hear ‘manga-eyed’ so many times? (There’s a whole layer of stuff I could complain about re Toyko.) What’s with the baffling repeated shoutouts to Bruce Sterling’s deeply mid Involution Ocean?
I’m probably skipping some steps in my argument here but probably the ultimate answer to all the foregoing is ‘this is an unserious book’. The dystopian b.y.h. Chronicles starts in a world where the younger generations have not seen the sun, as a floating cloud of trash blocks it out; this has started to disintegrate, for unknown reasons, in the years skipped between the second and third sections.
I cite this not just because it’s eye-roll ‘liberal’ ‘humour’, though it is. (Earlier we’ve heard that “Ben Gauzy” and “Locker Up” … “and other ancient curses / Which, like certain quotes or Bible verses, / Carried meaning even if their contexts / Weren’t well known.” No, the Anglophone left are the ones who voice empty shibboleths decade-on-decade; the Anglophone right are pursuaded of novel inconsequent things to yell every decade or so.) Though not returned to for 250 pages the vanishing garbage gloud turns out to be load-bearing; the second microscopic version of the e.b.w.t.b. Chronicles is a world built from this galactic trash (and shrunk.) It’s been built by Mandy Fiction, the e.b.w.t.b.’s author; this is what she’s done with her money from being the richest writer in history. She’s done it by building a team of AIs who get their ideas and energy by scanning the text of the online forum dedicated to her work and its fanfic. My note to myself simply read ‘I hate this.’ My next note, keyed to a section in which Guriel praises Mandy Fiction’s writing, i.e. his own, as an act of love, reads ‘sentimental toss’.
It may or may not trouble the reader to imagine a published writer of fiction decades from now somehow becoming rich enough to fund scientific-progress solutions to large systemic problems; we may or may not be operating on that level of realism, material conditions may not apply, etc. On a metaphorical level it’s not all that convincing either; the energy people spend imagining different pairs of vampires or wizards fucking is not translatable to a cure for global warming; nothing about how Stephanie Meyer or J.K. Rowling has deployed their money or influence suggests YA occupies a progressive place. Is fanfiction one? What’s the omegaverse fic of the e.b.w.t.b. Chronicles like? does Jason Guriel know what the omegaverse is? does he believe the implicit claims the novel makes about the values of these fictions, these energies, or is it a pose—that is, did he devote years of his life and 384 pages of heroic couplets to something insincere and cynical, or merely to something stupid?
Both the Book You’re Handling and the Eponymous Book Within The Book are prone to periphrasis: both in terms of, ten lines will tell you something that could be done in five; also in terms of, this story takes a long time to get to the point. The b.y.h., which is set in a dystopian medium futre, starts with a section focalised around a girl named Cat, introducing her life in the new Montreal, which is in a crater after a terraforming missile hit it: her home situation, her mum’s new boyfriend who she quite likes actually, her discovery—though not the point where she starts reading—the e.b.w.t.b.; in the second, she’s taking her skeptical best friend to a convention; this friend, Kaye, is the central figure of the third frame section, years having passed, she’s now in college; in the fourth, she arrives in Japan, where she’s to be assistant to a professor taking leave in the search for Mandy Fiction, author of the e.b.w.t.b. This is the end of the first of three parts; it’s also, effectively, the start of the plot. In the e.b.w.t.b. Chronicles we start with a general description of the werewolf whaler town; the second section, mirroring the b.y.h., has a fakeout protagonist, introducing Dot, a teen werewolf, who sees a ship eaten by a giant whale; her friend Paige will actually be the central figure. What forward momentum is arrived at by part two is swiftly dissipated as we start getting fanfic AU versions of the e.b.w.t.b., where the wolves are in space, or trees, or humans piloting wolf-shaped mechs.
Unclear why this YA title is the classic of this setting. Possibly we are meant to be assuming that the sketched-in characters we meet are given the dissertation-length surveys of their trivial inner selves that seem to characterise the blockbusters of that genre. (I’m not a YA fan but I don’t believe, on the evidence, that Guriel is either.) It’s also look-ma-no-hands weird-and-wacky in a way which might be intended as genuinely compelling or might be a joke about how weird some YA settings are; either way it doesn’t land. There’s a set of final revelations about the whale which make sense on the level of the SF b.y.h. Chronicles but not the YA fantasy e.b.w.t.b. one. The whole action of the YA e.b.w.t.b.: wolf teens see a ship eaten by a giant whale; they talk to a local shapeshifting eccentric about the last time this happened; deducing the giant whale is angry at her eggs being stolen, they set out on a junky ship to return them; they are attacked by pirates and escape, succeeding on their mission, realising the shapeshifting eccentric and the giant whale are, in fact, one species. This is about enough event for a longish short story. Now, in about twice this page count Milton justified God to Man, though to be fair he didn’t have to rhyme while he did it.
I’m unfamiliar with Guriel’s previous work, though I gather there’s a previous book in heroic couplets which shares a setting with the b.y.h. here. A couple of LitHub pieces he wrote around that one centre on a fairly classic hot take, the old ‘isn’t-Don Juan-more-radical/fulfilling/difficult than-The Cantos. I don’t have a position on that; I’ve never finished either. What one does find, reading Byron or Pound, though, is that they are capable of lines of extraordinary beauty, and of good jokes. On the evidence of 381 pages Guriel has neither.
Sharp claws were picking lyres in a tavern
By the shore: The Full-Moon Whaler’s Cavern.
Some nights there were full bands like The La’s,
The local troubadours whose gifted paws
Would bang out “Thar She Blows,” a brilliant tune
The La’s had stolen from their muse, the Moon.
Regarding the beauty, or its lack, I suspect Guriel could point to a tendency to allow femine endings to stretch the metre, going back to the Elizabethans, which would justify ‘tavern’, but the second line seems to role that into something entirely trochaic. ‘La’s’ and ‘paws’ do not rhyme, though this might be excused in a North American; I also found myself having to consciously sound out ‘buoy’ each of the hundred or so times it was deployed. Regarding the comedy, or its lack: yes, they’re whalers, we get it, very droll; except then Guriel explains the joke.
… Yawning, she began to hum
A pop song, “There She Goes,” which Poe had played
For her last week. “A work of brilliance, made
By human beings in the 1980s,”
Poe had said. “Pre-zuck. Before this Hades.
Band was called The La’s. From Liverpool.
They did one album. This song is the jewel.”
(I thought we were, as a culture, over thinking the La’s were any good. Anyway, do you find it funny that people say ‘pre-zuck’ for ‘before the online world’, or ‘onzuck’ instead of ‘online’, or ‘ZuckTube’ for ‘YouTube’? Go with god.)
What’s the heroic couplet doing here? well, it’s not being used directly as epic; nor is it being used exactly as mock-epic; it seems to have been a form Guriel just found permitted him to express his narrative at length, and with digression, as Byron did with rhyme royal, was it? in Don Juan. The diction is modern in ways that I’m not sure work. Guriel doesn’t allow himself poetic inversion or elision, though a certain amount of light syntactic rearrangement: Paige wraps a rope around her paws “As if she were self-bandaging with gauze” before the one extended action scene, where is she “gut-kicked”; since I’ve been watching Buffy lately it reminded me of the Whedon writing tic where a line is considered 20% more amusing if you get ‘slayage’ or ‘kissage’ into it instead of ‘kill’ or ‘kiss’. There’s a lot of enjambment, which sometimes seems comic—
The Sable stuff had called the billionaire
Away from exercises; tamped-down hair
Alluded to some sort of helmet he’d
Removed. He had the mounted-on-a-steed-
Like posture of a person taught to puff
Their chest out—someone polished to a buff
By wealth.
—and sometimes just lazy:
A white post stood on either side of Kaye.
They formed an arch above, which seemed to sway
A little in the wind. It was a giant
Jawbone, placed there by some self-reliant
Soul—and hammered like a wicket into
Sand. She gripped her plank and, scooting, withdraw
From the jawbone, edging back a couple
Feet.
Here Kaye has gone from a millionaire’s miniature reproduction of the world of the e.b.w.t.b Chronicles to another millionaire’s nanotech reproduction of same, as, remember, the e.b.w.t.b. comes to contain within it another version of the text: it’s like poetry, it rhymes. Some of this stuff I might get hyped for, I suppose, if I didn’t find the foot-by-foot movement so plodding. You have my apologies for that one.
—
Why is Kaye’s dad’s cancer introduced for a total of, I think, one page of angst? What exactly happened to the corporate drama? Who thinks a verse-paragraph of theoretical titles of academic papers about a made-up book is funny? Why do we visit the question of the sex organs of vampire bats three times? What’s with the glibly-handled sexual peril in the pirate attack, and is Byron somehow to blame for that? Did we need to hear ‘manga-eyed’ so many times? (There’s a whole layer of stuff I could complain about re Toyko.) What’s with the baffling repeated shoutouts to Bruce Sterling’s deeply mid Involution Ocean?
I’m probably skipping some steps in my argument here but probably the ultimate answer to all the foregoing is ‘this is an unserious book’. The dystopian b.y.h. Chronicles starts in a world where the younger generations have not seen the sun, as a floating cloud of trash blocks it out; this has started to disintegrate, for unknown reasons, in the years skipped between the second and third sections.
And scientists were stumped; there was no clear
Cause for the sudden, stunning dissolution
Of the cloud. The far right cried, “Illusion!,”
Claiming that the Cloud was still in place
And that projected stills of outer space
Were being cast by “globalists and Jews.”
But there were so many onzuck lies to choose
From.
I cite this not just because it’s eye-roll ‘liberal’ ‘humour’, though it is. (Earlier we’ve heard that “Ben Gauzy” and “Locker Up” … “and other ancient curses / Which, like certain quotes or Bible verses, / Carried meaning even if their contexts / Weren’t well known.” No, the Anglophone left are the ones who voice empty shibboleths decade-on-decade; the Anglophone right are pursuaded of novel inconsequent things to yell every decade or so.) Though not returned to for 250 pages the vanishing garbage gloud turns out to be load-bearing; the second microscopic version of the e.b.w.t.b. Chronicles is a world built from this galactic trash (and shrunk.) It’s been built by Mandy Fiction, the e.b.w.t.b.’s author; this is what she’s done with her money from being the richest writer in history. She’s done it by building a team of AIs who get their ideas and energy by scanning the text of the online forum dedicated to her work and its fanfic. My note to myself simply read ‘I hate this.’ My next note, keyed to a section in which Guriel praises Mandy Fiction’s writing, i.e. his own, as an act of love, reads ‘sentimental toss’.
It may or may not trouble the reader to imagine a published writer of fiction decades from now somehow becoming rich enough to fund scientific-progress solutions to large systemic problems; we may or may not be operating on that level of realism, material conditions may not apply, etc. On a metaphorical level it’s not all that convincing either; the energy people spend imagining different pairs of vampires or wizards fucking is not translatable to a cure for global warming; nothing about how Stephanie Meyer or J.K. Rowling has deployed their money or influence suggests YA occupies a progressive place. Is fanfiction one? What’s the omegaverse fic of the e.b.w.t.b. Chronicles like? does Jason Guriel know what the omegaverse is? does he believe the implicit claims the novel makes about the values of these fictions, these energies, or is it a pose—that is, did he devote years of his life and 384 pages of heroic couplets to something insincere and cynical, or merely to something stupid?
November 30, 2023
If you rhyme the 'P' of PEI with 'see' in the next line, it's not really a rhyming couplet, is it.
October 24, 2023
Wonderful, unique format, and great world building that feels so layered. Frame tale element. Didn't finish at this time, but hope to return when I'm in the mood.
April 17, 2024
FYI: This entire verse novel is told in rhyming couplets. Which is amazing and cool and you don't find many poets/authors doing that these days, so I grabbed this up. I did enjoy the rhythm of the words, the rhymes, etc., but this is 3 stars instead of 4 because I was expecting more of a plot in the first 100 pages based on *my expectations*. I hadn't read anything else by this author, so maybe this is their normal style. Be prepared to settle in for some world building, ramp up, then rush to the end, loose threads. But read it for the fun of it all.
November 20, 2024
This book is a wild ride. Equal parts ancient sea-faring epic and imaginative sci-fi verse novel, The Full-Moon Whaling Chronicles is a mashup of archaic and futuristic sensibilities. What’s even more incredible is that it’s told entirely in verse. This is not an easy read, as it challenges your brain to piece together abstract lines and invented terminology, but it is something wholly fresh and new, which makes it stand out in a world of Marvelization.
December 9, 2023
One of the most interesting verse novels I have read...not many sci-fi novels in verse first place plus...I like how each narrative has it's own tone, style and genre which kind if bleed into each other! Hilarious and un to read the verses regarding "Full Moon's fandom + convention scene! Gene hacking + bio-techery in cosplays...hmm thing of future?
April 2, 2024
This is a wild and beautiful book. Werewolf-futurism, fanfic subcultures, climate tech- and everything is in verse. Some lines made me laugh aloud (the extravagances of fan conventions!), some made me cry (). Often I had to set it down because I was getting Tetris brain with rhyming couplets.
You need a tolerance for uncertainty/confusion to thrive with this book. Similar to reading the Locked Tomb series, sometimes you have to just trust that things will eventually make sense. You also need to suspend the traditional notion of a rhyming couplet...there are verses with multiple line breaks and even transitions to different storylines. A good artist learns the rules, then breaks them with purpose.
Open your mind, sit back and enjoy the wondrous visions - you have never read anything like this.
You need a tolerance for uncertainty/confusion to thrive with this book. Similar to reading the Locked Tomb series, sometimes you have to just trust that things will eventually make sense. You also need to suspend the traditional notion of a rhyming couplet...there are verses with multiple line breaks and even transitions to different storylines. A good artist learns the rules, then breaks them with purpose.
Open your mind, sit back and enjoy the wondrous visions - you have never read anything like this.
November 3, 2024
My favourite book of 2023
February 18, 2025
A very challenging read, and quite the ambitious undertaking. The concepts and ideas are interesting, but after a while the verse became distracting.
March 23, 2025
It is the Dystopian Near Future - a hilarious (yes, HILARIOUS) book about a very possible imminent time when the Ice Caps have melted - written entirely as a Surrealistic Long Poem in Rhyming Couplets.
Good news for us readers - our books now live and breathe virtually - and on the jagged rock that Used to be Newfoundland, a couple of booksellers run a bookstore trying to quell the chaos that the world and these very much living and breathing books have become.
A missile has vaporized most of their island in the government's failed attempt to excavate the summery Arctic in search of cash to replenish its dwindled-to-zero coffers.
If you dare, get this one.
Guaranteed to make you bust a gut larfing!
Five Stars to Torontonian Jason -
Who might be able to tell us why -
The BEST BOOKS ARE SOMETIMES SLEEPERS!!!🤔
Good news for us readers - our books now live and breathe virtually - and on the jagged rock that Used to be Newfoundland, a couple of booksellers run a bookstore trying to quell the chaos that the world and these very much living and breathing books have become.
A missile has vaporized most of their island in the government's failed attempt to excavate the summery Arctic in search of cash to replenish its dwindled-to-zero coffers.
If you dare, get this one.
Guaranteed to make you bust a gut larfing!
Five Stars to Torontonian Jason -
Who might be able to tell us why -
The BEST BOOKS ARE SOMETIMES SLEEPERS!!!🤔
October 5, 2024
A dystopian future that includes an alternate Montreal, a beloved story involving whaling (Newfie?) werewolves deeply embedded in the culture, fan fiction, cosplay, human miniaturization for space-spacing reasons and more, all in couplets. Deeply imaginative and satisfying.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews