The Chamber, by Will Dean

[rachelmanija]

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.

Ellen has intrusive thoughts - identified in those words - of self-harm and harming others, which she has never told anyone about. She has evolved coping methods for them.

For most of the book, we think Ellen has a husband and two children. Late in the book, we learn that they died three years ago in a car crash while she was on a dive.

The divers never do any actual detection or put together any clues. They do suspect that their food might be getting poisoned, and start eating only packaged food, then no food. But they never suspect each other until it's down to two of them, and even then, it's more of a vague paranoia. We never see what's happening outside of the chamber till the very end.

It turns out that the divers are getting poisoned with cyanide. When the chamber is finally opened, one of the two surviving divers, Andre, collapses. Ellen is immediately arrested for murder. She's bewildered. End of chapter.

Next chapter is headed "Four weeks later." It's not explained why Ellen was ever arrested in the first place - it's never explained what evidence anyone had against her. Andre, who survived the poisoning, was arrested because there was video footage of him fiddling with his reading glasses, and they found a hollow chamber in his glasses filled with cyanide capsules. There's no explanation of why, other than maybe diving-related trauma.

Ellen has intrusive thoughts that maybe she was the one who carefully constructed the cyanide glasses! So maybe we should believe that she was the killer all along. Intrusive thoughts = psycho killer! And why, specifically did she come up with an elaborate plan to murder a bunch of divers? Presumably trauma from the deaths of her family. Then it's implied that maybe their accident was actually her murdering them! Or maybe not!

The book concludes with letters she and Andre wrote in the sub, which are equally maybe suspicious or maybe not.

I AM SO MAD YOU GUYS. There's no motive! "Wimmin be crazy" is not a motive! "Maybe diving made him do it" is not a motive! Intrusive thoughts do not mean you're a psycho killer!

THERE'S NO CLUES! Readers have absolutely no way of solving the mystery in advance, unless they guess that Ellen's intrusive thoughts mean she's the killer. But there's no clue that the cyanide was in Andre's glasses! There's no explanation of how either of them slipped the cyanide into the food or water without any of the MANY watchers noticing! There's no explanation of how Ellen could have HOLLOWED OUT SOMEONE ELSE'S READING GLASSES AND INSERTED MULTIPLE CYANIDE CAPSULES! How the fuck could she have done that in a tiny chamber with MANY watchers? And if she substituted the glasses, how did she know his prescription? And how did she get rid of his real glasses in a tiny chamber with almost nothing in it and MANY PEOPLE LITERALLY WATCHING THEIR EVERY MOVE?

ETA: I reread the ONE PARAGRAPH that is all we ever get on what MAYBE happened or maybe was a fantasy, and I was apparently blinded by rage because it does have slightly more details that I forgot. It says Ellen prepared the cyanide glasses in advance and mostly dropped the pills into the divers' mouths while they were sleeping. HOW DID SHE GET THE CYANIDE OUT OF GLASSES THAT WERE REGULARLY BEING USED BY SOMEONE ELSE WITH NO ONE NOTICING? HOW DID SHE KNOW ANDRE'S GLASSES PRESCRIPTION? HOW DID SHE DROP POISON IN ANYONE'S MOUTHS WITH NO ONE NOTICING? WHY DID SHE DO ANY OF IT?????

This is like if Agatha Christie wrote And Then There Were None, but took out the stuff about judging guilty people, left out all the clues, then stopped with two people left and just said, "It was one of them!" with NO EXPLANATION.



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! One of like two women in the entire field is possibly crazy.

Comments

[genarti]

Oh my god, the premise is so cool and the execution sounds ABSOLUTELY GODAWFUL. Really impressively so, in fact!

[rachelmanija]

I reread the "explanation" and added another angry paragraph.

I forgot to mention that Ellen also has intrusive thoughts of having killed someone and buried them on the beach. So are we supposed to believe that's also true? If so, that is literally all the information we ever get on that.

[genarti]

It kinda seems like that would be an important thing to spend at least a little more time on, I gotta say! But there are perhaps other priorities for this author to focus on first, like basic logic.