Cold Storage - David Koepp

   2019; 369 pages.  New Author? : Yes.  Genres : Thriller; Cri-Fi; Horror.  Overall Rating: 7*/10.

 

    Forty years ago, Death fell from the sky and nobody realized it.  It was attached to the first US Space Station, “Skylab”, which, after its orbit decayed far enough, fell out of orbit and broke up over the Indian Ocean and Western Australia.

 

    The piece carrying Death landed near the little town of Kiwirrkurra (a real place!  Wiki it.), where it remained undetected and almost completely dormant for a decade.  But it grew, slowly and surely, began to spread, until what started out as a plague-carrying fungus infected the entire community.

 

    Major Roberto Diaz and Lieutenant Colonel Trini Romano were dispatched to Kiwirrkura to resolve the situation.  They did it in spectacular and effective fashion – a plague/fungus may be tenacious and lethal, but it’s no match against a nuclear bomb.

 

    Before the detonation, a small sample of the fungus was collected, sealed in tube, and brought back to the US where it was “put to sleep” by deep-freezing it, and placed in a deep underground military repository, where it was then monitored round-the-clock.  Take that, killer fungus!  Nothing can go wrong.  Those safeguards are foolproof.

 

    Yeah, that’s what they always say, right before disaster strikes.

 

What’s To Like...

    The overall plotline of Cold Storage is similar to Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain, so if you liked that book, you’ll enjoy this one.  Here however, David Koepp fleshes out Crichton’s premise: the characters are more fully developed, the fungus attains a certain degree of sentience, and a subtle strand of humor is deftly instilled into the tale.

 

    The book’s back-cover blurb implies that Roberto Diaz is the primary protagonist, and he certainly plays a key part.  But the main characters are a pair of coworkers at Atchison Storage where the fungus is still stored: a nerdy 34-year-old nicknamed “Teacake” and his aloof romantic interest, Naomi.  There aren’t a ton of characters to keep track of, but they include a challenging number of bad guys and losers, plus a couple of neat animals in the form of a cat named Mr. Scroggins, the Rat King, a deer that can use the elevator, and a cockroach.  Yeah, try working those into a storyline sometime.

 

    Chemistry works its way into the story several times, which is always a plus for me since I’m a chemist by profession.  I can’t tell you much about the reaction of polysaccharides and sodium palmitate, nor what the properties of fluoroantimonic acid are, but I can tell you that the part about sulfites being added to wine coolers is spot on.

 

    I liked the musical nod to Blue Oyster Cult’s Don’t Fear The Reaper, and chuckled at Mooney’s views about God and where/how he got that nickname.  Roberto is a married man, but not immune to at least one bout of flirting and Teacake is a bit of a peeping-tom.  I'm partial to slightly-flawed heroes.

 

    The ending is appropriately exciting, but not very twisty, and a bit over-the-top.  Most of the bad guys get whacked, most of the good guys survive, the fungus gets funged.  Naomi and Teacake ride off into the sunset, and Roberto moves contentedly into retirement.  Cold Storage is a standalone story and I would be surprised if a sequel or series was made from it.

 

Ratings…
Amazon: 4.2*/5, based on 936 ratings.

Goodreads: 3.66*/5, based on 7,601 ratings and 1,455 reviews

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Endosymbiont (n.) : an organism that forms a symbiotic relationship with another cell or organism.

Others: Fulminations (n., plural).

 

 

Things That Sound Dirty But Aren’t…

    “Don’t put your fingers in there,” she said, but he didn’t answer, because they were this far, and there was no other obvious, easy way.”  (pg. 57)

 

Excerpts...

    Armillaria solidipes spreads across the landscape at a rate of one to three feet per year and can take thirty to fifty years to kill an average-sized tree.  If it could move significantly faster, 90 percent of all botanic growth on Earth would die, the atmosphere would turn to poison gas, and human and animal life would end.  But it is a slow-moving fungus.

    Other fungi are faster.

    Much faster.  (pg. 1)

 

    Headless, dehydrated, and dying, it had climbed 323 feet, straight up, on a slick surface.  Given its tiny size, this feat was the human equivalent of climbing Kilimanjaro on your knees right after going to the guillotine.  The tiny roach had performed perhaps the greatest act of physical conquest in the history of earthly life.

    Then a car parked on top of it.

    C-nRoach1 died with a squishy pop beneath the right rear tire.  (pg. 205)

 

“You can’t leave a dead deer by the side of the road with three broken legs, a bullet in its stomach, and four more in its head.”  (pg. 117)

    The quibbles are minor.  The pacing felt slow, but perhaps that’s inherent when you’re dealing with a sentient zombie fungus.  Similarly, the “trapped with a monster in a confined space” trope has been done to death, but how else can you keep the protagonists from simply running away from the slow-moving danger?

 

    There’s a fair amount of cussing – 32 instances in the first 20% of the book – but I thought it fit the tone of this type of tale.  Unsurprisingly, there were also references to several adult situations.

 

    The big problem were the WTFs.  There are some incredible coincidences that get our heroes to out of hopeless jams, including a timely appearance of a pistol-packing grandma and a jaw-dropping door-dropping desperation gunshot by Roberto.

 

    Still, I have a vague memory of a James Bond movie where he (Roger Moore, IIRC) jumps parachute-less out of a plane about to crash, lands on some flat, movable object, and snowboards down an alpine mountain (or maybe Mt. Everest), coming to a stop just in time to catch a toddy at a trendy outdoor coffeeshop.  Somehow, that daredevilry didn’t bother me a whit, and I think it was because it was in a movie, not a book.

 

    So perhaps it would be best if Cold Storage were made into a film.  I have a sneaking suspicion that's the author’s ultimate intent.  See below.

 

    7 Stars.  This is David Koepp’s first published novel, but, per Wikipedia and the book’s “About the Author” blurb, he is a celebrated screenwriter, credited with writing the films Jurassic Park, Spider-Man, Mission Impossible, War of the Worlds, Angels & Demons, and many more.  I'm impressed, and I think that’s why Cold Storage reads like a movie script.