Daniel Kraus writes horror that takes its own premises entirely seriously, which is why the premises tend to sound absurd in summary and read as unbearable on the page. Whalefall (2023) puts a teenage diver inside a sperm whale with an hour of air and turns the situation into a study of a boy's relationship with his dead father, worked out under a deadline measured in litres. Rotters (2011), which won the Odyssey Award, follows a boy apprenticed to his father's grave-robbing. The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch runs two volumes and a century, following a murdered gangster who will not stay dead through American history. He has collaborated with Guillermo del Toro on the novel of The Shape of Water and on the Trollhunters books, later adapted by Netflix, and was chosen to complete George A. Romero's unfinished final novel, The Living Dead (2020), from Romero's manuscript and notes. Kraus has also written for film and worked as a documentary maker. He lives in Chicago.