Wednesday, September 25, 2024

The Chamber

The Chamber by Will Dean, 332 pages

Six divers have just entered a hyperbaric chamber that will keep them at depth pressure for the next month as they do ocean floor maintenance work in the North Sea. It's dangerous work, and there's no exiting their tiny space until the work is done and they have gone through several days of slow decompression to avoid the bends. But just a day into their mission, one of the divers doesn't wake up, and he certainly didn't die of natural causes. Even with the rest of the mission cancelled, they have four days of being locked together in a tiny chamber before they can get out.

The premise of this book has the potential to be a claustrophobic and terrifying thriller. Unfortunately, the execution doesn't live up to the potential, as the readers are told about the panic the characters were feeling rather than feeling it through the writing. It's not a horrible book, and I feel like I learned a lot about deep-sea work (which was fascinating — I once had a neighbor who was an underwater welder, and this book shed light on what his work was like). But I was disappointed that such a great premise went to waste on such meh writing.

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