The Chamber

Six divers are in a hyperbaric chamber in order to repair oil pipes on the sea bed, when one of the group is found unresponsive. They must wait four days before they can be safely brought back to the surface, but they soon find themselves pushed to their limits.

This was everything I have come to expect from a Will Dean novel – it was clever, exciting and utterly terrifying.

You get an immediate sense of the danger that divers face on a daily basis and just how risky it is as a job. The descriptions of the chamber made it feel so tense and claustrophobic. I really felt for those characters as they were stuck in such conditions.

I was put on edge by this book, so much so that I found myself gripping the Kindle really tightly when I was reading the most tense parts!

The Chamber is a brilliant thriller that left me speechless.

Thank you NetGalley and Hodder & Stoughton for sending this book for review consideration. All opinions are my own.

Utterly gripping, I couldn’t put this down and read it in a day. It was tense, face paced and original. The detail to the technical knowledge needed and the way the author enabled us to experience the life of a sat diver was exemplary. The unfolding backstory meant some twists and turns and we were kept guessing till the end. In fact, I feel I’m still guessing some what. This isn’t a story where everything is neatly tied up and presented to the reader with a bow on top. There is some ambiguity that will make for a great discussion post publication I’m sure.

A small group of divers have been paid incredibly well to live in a hyperbaric chamber for around a month. Their job is to dive to the bottom of the sea bed and repair oil pipes. The job is incredibly dangerous and everyone relies on everyone being diligent and professional.
But when a member of the team is found unresponsive in his bunk, the group becomes tense, fractious and suspicious of each other, especially as that member had never ventured from his bunk all day.
With a four day wait for decompression of the chamber to happen, mind games start to play on the remaining group. After all if someone doesn’t unlock the chamber they will all die.
I’m not sure I’ve read such a taut tense book like this before.
This really is the ultimate locked in mystery.
This is a testament of a writer that is on top of their game. I found myself transfixed and uncomfortable at the same time, but in a good way.
Will Dean really is a fine and clever writer and I found this book to be astonishingly good.

How can a book set in one tiny chamber be fast paced and frightening? Just add one Will Dean.
A really unusual mystery which did nothing to ease my claustrophobia and which I zipped through in one day. A definite must read.

I would give this book 6 stars if that was an option.

Genuinely the most claustrophobic, intense, terrifying book I have read in my life!

There are so many twists, turns, and revelations that I never knew what was coming next. The closer I got to the end, the faster I read because I NEEDED to know.

Will Dean is a master of terror and tension!

Will Dean does it again. What an incredible writer. The Chamber is one of those books that hooks you in. The descriptions so clear that you truly get a picture of life for saturation divers. The sheer claustrophobia, being dependable on others for everything. Then what happens when things start to go wrong.

The author is definitely cementing his place amongst those I watch out for time and time again.

Wow!

You know how thrilers are often described as “nail-biting” or “nerve-shredding” as a massively exaggerated explainer of their high-stakes? The Chamber, the sixth novel by high-concept thriller powerhouse Will Dean, has delivered a novel that is, without question, one of the tensest things I have ever read? My nails? Bitten. My nerves? Shredded.

The Chamber is written from the first-person perspective of Ellen Brooke, an experienced saturation diver. Along with 6 others, she’s on a mission to the bottom of the North Sea. Brooke’s work is highly specialised and dangerous; together with her fellow divers, she bunks down in a tiny metal capsule 100m below the surface for weeks at a time, cut off from the world around them and completely reliant on their onshore caretakers. If you are in any way claustrophobic, this work will put the fear of god in you, as it did me – and the stakes get higher ater about 20% into the book, when one of the divers aboard dies in his bunk. But the divers need to decompress their sub slowly – it’ll take 4 days, in fact. All the while not knowing who the killer – if there is one – is. And so, a fascinating novel about a terrifying, niche line of work becomes a fascinating, terrifying locked-room thriller.

Will Dean is so good at suspense and atmosphere as well as being wildly intelligent in both concept and execution, and this one is no different. The Chamber draws the reader into an entirely new world – Dean has done some amount of research; there’s even a glossary of terms at the beginning. We are given enough information to educate us on a topic most of us probably know very little about, but we aren't overly bogged down in details.

The Chamber is a masterclass in tension; by taking a deeply (heh) claustrophobic scenario and making it – somehow – worse! My god, the situation these divers find themselves in is hellish. I physically recoiled from this book a few times; Dean doesn’t spare the reader the horrors of this line of work, both actual and hypothetical. “Bacterial ear rot” is a string of words I never want to read again, and I will never see raspberry jam the same way.

The novel is pacy but never too fast; perhaps I would have liked a slightly longer epilogue as I was left with many, many questions at the end of this one. Maybe it was because I read this one sick in bed but I did finding the ending ambiguous to the point of confusion.
There’s so much at play here – Ellen’s position as one of the only women in her line of work, the fact that the whole thing is jammed with MacBeth references – it’s a lot to take in. But Dean manages to keep all the plates spinning impressively. A queasy, terrifying, jaw-dropping thriller that I won’t forget in a hurry.

Oh this was fantastic. Filled with tension and claustrophobia and even all the diving detail (which wouldn’t normally be my thing!) only added to the drama. The writing is excellent.

The Chamber is a fascinating, addictive book. I knew nothing about saturation diving and the level of detail in this book is really interesting.
Six divers are saturation diving in the North Sea, living together in a small diving chamber. One of them suffers a quick death and from there we're taken on a tale of suspicion and survival.
The worst thing about Will Dean's books is that they have to end. Absolutely brilliant!

Another brilliant thriller from Will Dean. Tense, claustrophobic, breathless.

Thanks for this advance copy.

What an intense, terrifying thriller this was! I LOVED The Last Passenger, the last third of which was utterly bonkers, so I had very high hopes for The Chamber. I read the majority of this on a plane on a night flight which definitely set the mood! It's a classic claustrophobic, closed room thriller. Initially, I found the repetition of some phrases and personal histories a bit odd, but as you're dragged into Ellen's rapidly deteriorating mind it starts to make more sense. Her backstory reveal was timed to perfection and the ambiguity of the final few pages was fantastic - I've just re-read them again and I'm still not altogether clear what happened! Another amazing read from Will Dean. Biggest thanks to NetGalley, Will Dean and Hodder & Stoughton for the ARC.

OMG, I couldn’t breathe, literally. The thought of being stuck without oxygen and daylight set my senses tingling and when the deaths started I wanted to rush to the end to discover ‘who Dunnit’ and so I could feel like I could take a breath. I kept changing my mind over who the murderer was but also couldn’t figure out how it had happened. At times I thought it was via food, water, air etc. The thought of being kept in a tight space with dead bodies almost pushed me over the edge. After reading this I then bought another Will Dean as I enjoyed it so much.

This was a gripping read, I thought the characters were intriguing and I'm going to keep an eye out for more from this author.