The Chamber by Will Dean

Published in the UK in June 2024; published by Atria/Emily Bestler Books on August 6, 2024

This is a plot that crime fiction fans will likely have encountered before. A half dozen people have gathered in a remote area. One by one, they die of an unknown cause. If foul play is afoot, one of the group members is likely a murderer. Is the killer one of the survivors or did the butler do it?

The Chamber images that six deep-sea divers are housed in a diving bell. Because they are living at the bottom of the sea, they cannot leave. Bringing them back to the surface will take days because they need to decompress.

The divers (or at least some of them) die serially for no apparent reason. Their job requires them to be compulsive about hygiene, but is it possible that the atmosphere or their food supply is contaminated? Could someone outside the bell be poisoning them?

The details of saturation diving make The Chamber a thriller that reads like a horror novel. Will Dean conveys the fear, claustrophobia, exhilaration, and boredom of confinement in a cramped undersea chamber, breathing helium, anticipating a simple and last mistake, and enduring days of tedium when the chamber returns to its mother ship. All of this to keep the oil flowing. I can’t imagine why anyone would choose this occupation. Just reading about it makes me cringe.

The narrator is Ellen Brooke. She is the only woman on a team of divers working at the bottom of the North Sea. Each character has a personality, some more than others if only because some characters outlive others and thus spend more time in the reader’s company. Although all saturation divers are trained to respond to contingencies in the same way, each character has his (and her) own way of dealing with adversity. Their differing responses to a growing threat (including the degree to which they are willing to continue trusting each other rather than allowing order to break down entirely) contribute to the story’s realism.

 The divers pass the time by telling funny or harrowing stories about other diving experiences, either commercially or in the military. Death is obviously on the characters’ minds — it would be even if they weren’t dying, one by one — and some of the most intense moments come as characters discuss the deaths of family and soldiers and co-workers. All the stories add flavor to the novel, but they also add meat to the characters.

Ellen misses her children when she accepts long contracts, to the point where she brings their towels with her so she can smell them. (I don’t understand the desire to smell kids. If they ever have a pleasant odor, I haven’t noticed.) In any event, although the money is good, I wondered why Ellen works in a dangerous occupation that makes her miserable by keeping her away from her kids for weeks at a time. To Will Dean’s credit, the novel eventually provides a convincing and surprising explanation of Ellen’s choice, one that will help the reader understand the underlying mystery.

With nearly a hundred people working on the mother ship, the list of potential suspects is long, assuming they are positioned to poison the divers’ food or drinks. The suspects that occur to Ellen include the supervisor (although he’s always been trustworthy), the night supervisor (less well liked), and the medic who sends down medications that never revive them after they pass out. None have an obvious motive, but neither do the other divers. After all, they’ve each saved the lives of the others repeatedly.

At the same time, Dean suggests that extreme environments (particularly the deep-sea confinement that causes “bubble brain”) might lead to extreme behaviors. The Chamber earns its status as a horror novel by making me contemplate a month in a bubble with five other people, one of whom might be a crazed killer.

Tension builds as divers die while their co-workers, both inside the bell and on the ship, are unable to protect or save them. Dean creates a solid mystery by delaying the reveal until after the action seems to have ended. The mystery’s resolution takes some effort to unravel. Dean plants suggestions that point in opposite directions until the reader thinks them through, yet enough ambiguity remains to encourage second-guessing. For the clever way in which Dean stretches an old plot into new dimensions and his masterful creation of characters and atmosphere, I give The Chamber a strong recommendation.

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The Last Thing to Burn by Will Dean

Published by Atria/Emily Bestler Books on April 20, 2021

Frank Tussock is a farmer in rural England. He is holding captive an undocumented Vietnamese immigrant named Thanh Dao. Frank broke Thanh’s ankle to keep her hobbled. Whenever Thanh tries to escape, Frank burns one of her possessions, stealing everything from Thanh that helps her remember her identity. Among Thanh’s last possessions are letters from her sister, another undocumented immigrant who took up residence elsewhere in England. Frank uses Thanh’s sister against her, promising that the sister will be deported if Thanh kills him or escapes.

Frank uses Thanh as a servant and as a sexual slave. He expects Thanh to prepare meals as is mother did, to wear his mother’s bra, to use his mother’s rags in lieu of sanitary napkins. Frank has serious mommy issues. When Thanh becomes pregnant seven years into her captivity, Frank seems moderately happy, perhaps envisioning a future servant. But he doesn’t want to have sex with Thanh while she’s leaking milk (he was equally fastidious about her period before she got pregnant), so he takes another woman captive. Cynthia Townsend dropped by on a couple of occasions to inquire about buying some of Frank’s land before he captured her. Frank holds Cynthia in the basement and presumably uses her as a sexual substitute for Thanh, although none of those scenes are explicit.

The Last Thing to Burn tells a simple story, perhaps a bit too simple given that it has only three characters until a fourth makes a brief appearance near the end. I didn’t entirely buy Frank’s decision to risk kidnapping Cynthia, particularly after learning late in the novel that Thanh wasn’t Frank’s only sexual option. Nor did I entirely buy Thanh’s decision not to tell Cynthia that she was being held captive when she first had the chance, before Cynthia also became a prisoner. Finally, I didn’t regard Cynthia’s strength at the novel’s end to be plausible after behind held in a dank basement and subsisting on scraps.

Still, the story is chilling. Will Dean uses Thanh’s first-person narration to place the reader inside her head. Her fear and hopelessness, eventually replaced by fear and determination, seem perfectly authentic.

Frank’s accent, speech pattern, and ill-educated vocabulary add to the illusion that the story is real. Frank is one of the creepiest characters I’ve recently encountered, but his creepiness seems perfectly consistent with his upbringing and rural isolation. Dean’s prose develops the plot with understated power. An epilog is perhaps too optimistic — the promise of quick healing is a bit hard to swallow — but as a horror story of evil endured and defeated, The Last Thing to Burn is largely a success.

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