This year’s best thrillers come in various shades of suspense, dread and wonder. But each leads the reader down a twisty path toward an unknown destination.

Let’s begin with Daniel Kraus’s wholly original, almost obscenely entertaining WHALEFALL (MTV Books, 336 pp., $27.99), which concerns the efforts of a hapless 17-year-old named Jay Gardiner to escape from a most improbable prison.

Jay’s father, Mitt, a legendary diver and mean drunk, recently drowned himself off the coast of Monterey, Calif., suffering from terminal cancer. But when Jay tries to help his grieving family by recovering his father’s remains, he is slurped up by a passing whale, becoming an unexpected side dish to the whale’s main meal of giant squid.

As he fights his way out, Jay has in his arsenal an hour’s worth of oxygen and a lifetime of lessons, on whales as well as humans, imparted to him by his dad. Kraus, the author of numerous science fiction and fantasy novels — and, with Guillermo del Toro, of the novel version of the film “The Shape of Water” — infuses his prose with a scientist’s rigor and a poet’s sensibility.

You won’t meet a more tortured or resourceful hero this year. And you won’t meet a nobler or more surprising whale, either.