The Chamber, by Will Dean

I finished reading this and immediately rushed to write this review to warn people off this book. It's one of those books where I was VERY ANGRY upon finishing it, and thinking about it more only made me angrier.

I bought it on the strength of this blurb:

And Then There Were None meets The Last Breath in this tense and suspenseful locked-room thriller that takes place inside a hyperbaric chamber.

Six experienced saturation divers are locked inside a hyperbaric chamber. Calm and professional, they know that rapid decompression would be fatal and so they work in shifts, breathing helium, and surviving in hot, close quarters.

Then one of them is found dead in his bunk...

Ellen Brooke, the narrator, is one of the very, very few female saturation divers. Sat divers do repairs and maintenance on underwater structures by being living in an extremely high pressure chamber in between doing their dives, so they only need to do decompression once, when they finish the job. The chamber is above-water. If it's breached before it's decompressed, they will basically explode. This has happened once in real life, in an incident on the Byford Dolphin. It's gruesome.

The rest is as the blurb says: the divers start mysteriously dying within the chamber. The team outside immediately begins decompression, but this takes days. They can't open the chamber, or they'll all turn into raspberry jam (as is stated, in those words, something like 20 times.) So they're all trapped inside, maybe with a killer amonst them, trying to figure out what's happening and why.

I figured that even if the prose and characterization weren't the greatest, the book would be carried by the strength of its premise. The challenge from a writing standpoint is incredible. They can't get out. It's a tiny space. They can see each other at almost all times. They're being observed from the outside 24-7. And yet somehow they're getting killed off one by one. How can the writer pull off this bravura feat?

I will tell you how: by constructing the book like it's a locked-room mystery, and then not solving the mystery. Thought it would be incredibly hard to pull off a mystery under these circumstances? Ha ha! It's easy when you don't have to bother with solving the mystery.

Cut for angry, spoilery details. ( Read more... )

I hate this book. I hate it so much. It was pretty engaging, if somewhat repetitive, until the 98% mark and then it earned my FOREVER HATE.

ETA: Oh wait, I forgot to mention that in retrospect, given the ending, it's also really sexist! ( Read more... )