A thriller plot line is barely needed in Will Dean’s The Chamber (Hodder & Stoughton); the real-life terrors of the world he describes are enough to have any even vaguely claustrophobic heart racing. Dean, the author of the excellent Tuva Moodyson thrillers as well as a handful of standalone novels, sets his latest in the world of saturation diving in the early 00s. Here, deep sea divers work at more than 100 metres below sea level, living for up to a month in a pressurised, immensely cramped environment and breathing a mix of helium and oxygen so they can continue diving at depth without needing to decompress and thus risk nitrogen narcosis (the bends). Dean’s protagonist is Ellen Brooke, one of the few female saturation divers; she and five others will live for a month in a chamber “about the size of the back section of a bus” while they take shifts diving beneath the North Sea, fixing oil pipes. But then one of them dies. And then another. Are the people providing them with food and gases to breathe harming them? “In some ways, this is similar to an academic experiment that got out of hand: the lack of control we have, and the enormous list of ways in which they could inflict harm upon us if they so desired.” Or is the danger inside the chamber? As those in charge start the days-long decompression process, Ellen and her colleagues try to survive. “One might be an accident,” she writes on a piece of paper. “Two is a crime.” Horribly, claustrophobically compulsive.
“You like it darker? Fine. So do I,” writes Stephen King in the afterword to a new collection of short stories, You Like It Darker (Hodder & Stoughton), which range from the deliciously creepy (Willie the Weirdo, reminiscent of one of King’s best short stories, Gramma), to novels-in-miniature. Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream is one of the latter. The premise is a paranormal twist: a man has one prescient dream, and discovers where a body was buried. As his efforts to let the truth be known backfire on him, and spin out of control, this becomes a gripping story of an obsessively dangerous cop. My favourite, though, is Rattlesnakes, which made me jump for joy with its links to two previous King novels (no spoilers here, because it was too much fun to discover), while also chilling me to the bone. “Dusk, you know. Real things seem thinner then, at least to me.” Some of these stories are supernatural; some are not; many feature older protagonists; all are worth a read, as King continues his self-described project to “show the real world as it is, and to tell the truth about the America I know and love”.
