Happy publication day to Will Dean for The Chamber! Thank you to Hodder & Stoughton for an early read via NetGalley. Before I give you my thoughts, here’s the blurb.

The Blurb

HIGH PRESSURE OUTSIDE
On a boat heading out into the North Sea, Ellen Brooke steels herself to spend almost a month locked inside a hyperbaric chamber with five other divers. They are all being paid handsomely for this work – to be lowered each day inside a diving bell to the sea bed, taking it in turns to dive down and repair oil pipes that lie in the dark waters. It is a close knit team and it has to be: any error or loss of trust could be catastrophic.

EXTREME PRESSURE INSIDE
All is going to plan until one of the divers is found unresponsive in his bunk. He hadn’t left the chamber. It will take four more days of decompression, locked away together, before the hatch can be opened. Four more days of bare steel, intrusive thoughts, and the constant struggle not to give way to panic. Mind games, exhaustion, suspicion, and, most of all, pressure. And if someone does unlock the door, everyone dies…

My Review

I’m getting used to Will Dean filling my head with bizarre dreams at night. He has a way of writing that creeps into your mind and sits there, taunting you all day until you open the book again. The detail in this story is meticulous. Having heard Will speak on how he plans his novels, I’m sure he spent considerable time researching saturation diving before he went into his own isolation to write the first draft.

I knew very little about saturation diving before reading this. Thanks to all that detail, I know quite a bit more now. I could easily imagine the space in the chamber, although I think for my own sanity, I made it a bit bigger in my head. It is, quite literally, a claustrophobic read. It has similarities with The Last Passenger in that things are going majorly wrong and no one knows why. Most importantly, no one knows who to trust. At least on a cruise ship the characters had space to get away from one another. Not so in The Chamber.

Will Dean has paced the story well, especially with time slowly ticking down as the chamber is depressurised and, although freedom beckons, madness descends among the crew. It’s a classic Will Dean ending where you find you still have questions that will never be answered. I suppose the real question is what will the next book be about? I’m predicting caving. Brilliant read.

To buy the book, click here.

The Author

Will Dean grew up in the East Midlands, living in nine different villages before the age of eighteen. After studying law at the LSE, and working many varied jobs in London, he settled in rural Sweden with his wife. He built a wooden house in a boggy forest clearing and it’s from this base that he compulsively reads and writes.