Another ocean-inspired psychological thriller comes to us from Will Dean! The Chamber builds a healthy respect and awe towards our planet's watery depths (like in Dean's The Last One) while delivering a riveting story of saturation diving, considered the apex of the profession. Replete with a glossary and diagram, Dean's account feels both scientific and gripping at the same time.
Six people embark on a job few professional divers are qualified to do. These highly trained individuals will spend a month living in a small chamber the size of a minibus on the ocean floor and working on undersea oil infrastructure. Their bodies will be pressurized the whole time: their tissues will be saturated with gases, and they will be breathing helium instead of air.
The whole ship and crew above them are designed to keep the Sat divers safe. However, because of the team being pressurized in the chamber, they must remain segregated. The divers have learned many mantras from their experience such as, "don't follow your instincts, follow your training". However, when someone in the chamber dies from an unknown cause, one mantra stands out above the rest: "you panic, you die".
The decompression process, when those above realize the divers need to be brought up, is painstaking and arduous. One character describes it as "turning the cap", likening it to easing the cap off a Coca Cola bottle a little at a time so the soda doesn't spill over. Except in this case, it's the divers' hemoglobin they don't want to spill over. The divers must endure days of decompression before coming to the surface. Meanwhile, others in the chamber begin to mysteriously die, one by one.
Peppered with fascinating stories of undersea adventures and disasters, along with a haunting description of one character's utero-like experience in the deep, The Chamber mesmerizes. Will Dean creates believable and multi-faceted characters while building palpable suspense! This reader also learned something about an amazing profession I knew nothing about. I love it when a novel does that. Will Dean's The Chamber gets five stars out of https://youtube.com/shorts/2gtzAPXuj5s?si=WRks2mFSZlU7cnhb
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