Given how much I adore Will Dean’s writing (see my reviews of his books here) I was thrilled to be asked if I’d like to participate in the blog tour for Will’s new book, The Chamber. My enormous thanks to to Alainna Hadjigeorgiou for inviting me to take part and for sending me a copy of The Chamber in return for an honest review.

Published by Hodder and Stoughton on 6th June 2024, The Chamber is available for purchase through the links here.

The Chamber

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 of The Chamber

Ellen Brooke is going on a dive.

Oh goodness! What a book…

There’s a glossary of technical terms at the start of The Chamber which induced a feeling of panic and claustrophobia in me and which simply didn’t abate. This book is terrifying for those of us who don’t enjoy confined spaces and, equally, for those who do! I genuinely had to stop reading at times to allow myself to decompress. 

Will Dean incorporates enough technical detail to create authenticity and atmosphere without slowing the narrative, but what is most terrifying is the way the chapter endings heighten the tension incrementally until I found I was reading and holding my breath. The writing in The Chamber is so skilled. The balance of exposition to highly natural and convincing direct speech, the range of sentence structure, with brevity often meaning increased edginess, the pacy chapters – all these elements combine with a narrator, Ellen Brooke, who may or may not be reliable, into a menacing, compelling read. In addition, the genuine historical events that are mentioned make what is happening in The Chamber feel all the more real. 

Right through The Chamber, as the body count increased, I had absolutely no idea who or what was causing the deaths. The mounting suspicion, the mental toll on characters and the question of who to trust kept me guessing throughout. There is, I felt, just a slight ambiguity (or maybe that’s just my poor suspicious brain after being so hooked into the narrative) at the end that made me wonder if all had been revealed in quite the way we have been led to believe. Truth is a slippery concept and is explored with manipulative brilliance here. It felt as if the surviving characters were living on beyond the confines of the story.

Themes in The Chamber are layered and mature. Alongside truth are loyalty, respect, family and compulsion. The story really examines what drives an individual to take on such dangerous work and how relationships are the bedrock of behaviour. The characterisation is developed through interactions in the diving chamber, but also through storytelling as each diver recounts memories from their past, so that we have a clear understanding of each of the six divers and yet we have no understanding of them at all. We only really know what they allow us to see. Least is known about Tea-Bag as he is the newest with the most recent experience so that the reader is manipulated more by the more experienced characters. This story messes with the reader’s mind! 

I loved the references to Shakespeare because they lent a feeling of danger and mistrust. Because many of these references are from Macbeth, it made me suspect Ellen as the perpetrator throughout, given Lady Macbeth’s role in the murder of Duncan. However, you’ll need to read The Chamber to see if I was correct.

Not only is The Chamber a gripping whodunnit, but it’s a first class howdunnit too. I’m aware that I haven’t really done it justice, but suffice it to say that I found it convincing, terrifying and believable. I found the sense of claustrophobia almost unbearable and yet I could not stop immersing myself in the book. The Chamber cements firmly in my mind that Will Dean is one of the most skilled suspense writers of the current generation. Don’t miss this one. 

About Will Dean

Will Dean grew up in the East Midlands and had lived in nine different villages before the age of eighteen. After studying Law at the LSE and working in London, he settled in rural Sweden where he built a house in a boggy clearing at the centre of a vast elk forest, and it’s from this base that he compulsively reads and writes. His debut novel in the Tuva Moodyson series, Dark Pines, was selected for Zoe Ball’s Book Club, shortlisted for the Guardian Not the Booker prize and named a Daily Telegraph Book of the Year. Red Snow was published in January 2019 and won Best Independent Voice at the Amazon Publishing Readers’ Awards, 2019. Black River was shortlisted for the Theakstons Old Peculier Award in 2021. Will also writes standalone thrillers: The Last Thing to Burn, First Born, the top twenty hardback bestseller The Last Passenger and The Chamber.

For further information, find Will on Twitter/X @willrdean, Instagram and Facebook.

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