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

[shipperslist]

Oof. It sounds like the author was too enamored with his own self for being Such Smarts.

[hilarita]

I mean like I *guess* you can market that as a tense psychological thriller, but not in any way a mystery. Because the premise of a mystery is that it is solved. And even with a thriller, the mystery-type thrillers have a solution!
I mean also thanks for reading it so that we can take steps to avoid it.

[rachelmanija]

As a thriller, it's incredibly anti-climactic. The clock ticks down! The heroine is arrested! Then everything else happens off-page and in the past.

[rachelmanija]

The author is on my "never read again" list forever.

[grayswandir]

Wow. What a waste of a potentially great premise.

[oracne]

AGH. NOPE.

[black_bentley]

I've read one book by the same author (The Last Passenger) and it made me SO ANGRY I will never read another of his. Loads of people had raved about it online, and like this one it had a really promising premise - woman wakes up on a cruise ship and discovers all the other people on board have disappeared - but it was terrible. When the big reveal came I'd have thrown it across the room if it wasn't a library book.

And it had an unbelievably stupid ending. I'm angry all over again just thinking about it.

[rachelmanija]

Please spoil the big reveal and stupid ending!

[black_bentley]

The big reveal - it's a reality TV show and everyone else is in on it!

The ending - main character is on her flight home, goes to the toilet and when she comes out... all the other passengers and crew are gone!

I was SPITTING. BLOOD.

[rachelmanija]

Thanks, I hate it.

[sovay]

The team outside immediately begins decompression, but this takes days.

Scientifically what? Deep dives don't take days to come back up from. [edit] Missed somehow it was saturation diving. I have seen the timetables on that. My other complaint still holds.

I feel like I'm hearing about a lot of thrillers lately that have these complex premises and totally emoji-shrug opt-out doesn't-ambiguity-mean-not-knowing-what-the-fuck-was-ever-going on endings and it's true that I have seen narratives of this pattern as far back as the '40's (and didn't enjoy them then!), but I don't understand why the increase in popularity.

[black_bentley]

Isn't it awful? When I got to the reveal I was like, "this cannot POSSIBLY be what this whole fucking book has been building up to, I didn't even pay for this book and I want to be compensated."

[landingtree]

This sucks! Thank you for the warning and for teaching me about saturation diving! The premise is so claustrophobic that I would probably not have read it, but it is nevertheless very cool and I'm sad it was wasted here.

[swan_tower]

In the absence of other arguments, I'm going to blame the vibes-first, everything-else-a-distant-second mentality. Does it sound cool in a thirty-second TikTok video? GREAT.

[asakiyume]

Oh boy. That's like a magician in a magic show getting on stage and then not doing any magic tricks and instead just saying, "Wimmin, amirite?"

[isis]

I appreciate your dedication to reviewing crappy books so we don't have to read them!

[mildred_of_midgard]

That sounds horrible!

[sovay]

In the absence of other arguments, I'm going to blame the vibes-first, everything-else-a-distant-second mentality. Does it sound cool in a thirty-second TikTok video? GREAT.

I too like vibes! I also like the everything else!

[genarti]

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

[lilacsigil]

I read a really great, tense article about saturation divers so I am astonished that someone could read that and then write...this.

[rachelmanija]

I would want to throw the book not just across the room, but at the author.

[rachelmanija]

Please warn me about any others you remember.

[rachelmanija]

YES.

[rachelmanija]

I expected this one to be great!

[rachelmanija]

Right? I'm so angry.

[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.

[rachelmanija]

Sat diving is really cool! This book is really not.

[sovay]

Right? I'm so angry.

Can I request you write something about saturation diving/hyperbaric chambers that doesn't suck? The bar is in the Mariana Trench.

[rachelmanija]

Oh boy. That would be a loooooot of research.

[sovay]

Oh boy. That would be a loooooot of research.

Well, it doesn't have to be fulfilled any time soon. It just seems unfair that this novel should be taking up the oxygen, so to speak, in the subgenre.

[lokifan]

!!!!!!

WHY IS HE SO TERRIBLE.

[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.

[mikeda]

Minor point but I can actually see the reasoning the police might have used. Something along the lines of "There's a mass murderer. Can't be one of the dead people. One of the two survivors just collapsed so it must be the other one."

(I agree that they SHOULDN'T have arrested her on only this reasoning, but I can easily see a police department doing this.)

[rachelmanija]

Yes, but it felt extremely random/abrupt the way it happened.

[green_knight]

As a person who wears glasses - thick glasses with heavy rims – I can only roll my eyes. You cannot substitute one pair of glasses for another; they're individual, and even the same model of frame will handle differently (eg stiffness of screws). There is also no way you could hide anything larger than half a grain of rice in my glasses.

The book sounds dreadful.

[gwyn]

Fucking hell, I can see why you were so enraged! This is often the kind of crap I have had to work on as a copyeditor, and I have to practically medicate myself to get through it without writing queries in GIANT FUCKING CAPITALS. Also, shit, those must be some really thick glasses frames. I mean, I'm wearing some right now that are monumentally thick (total hipster $$$ crap) and you could not fit even a tiny tablet into the temples or the glass frames. To say nothing of the prescription part.

I've been saving this table flip emoji for something appropriate: ( °□°) ︵ ┻━┻

[rachelmanija]

Right? And even if you could get them in, how the hell could you get them out with no one noticing? Especially when they're someone else's glasses!