David Koepp is the ninth most successful screenwriter of all time in terms of U.S. box office receipts with a total gross of over $2.3 billion.
He wrote Jurassic Park, Spider-Man, and Mission: Impossible, but that’s not why I picked up his debut novel Cold Storage.
I went looking for it after I listened to his novella Yard Work a speculative fiction story about refusing to give up just because you’re old and alone.
I wanted to see what a man who could write a story like that would do with a thriller.
The publisher’s summary for Cold Storage was so generic, I’d probably have passed over the book if I hadn’t already read Yard Work.
They thought it was contained. They were wrong.
After decades underground in a forgotten sub-basement, a highly mutative organism – capable of extinction-level destruction – has found its way out. Only Pentagon bioterror operative Roberto Diaz can stop it. With the help of two unwitting security guards, he has one night to quarantine this horror, before it destroys all of humanity.
The summary isn’t inaccurate but it leaves out everything that makes this book original and fun. The summary isn’t inaccurate but it leaves out everything that makes this book original and fun.
The story starts deep in the Australian desert in the 1980s, with a two-person American military team and a bio-weapons scientist being sent to investigate a potential bio-hazard related to a salvaged piece of wreckage from when NASA’s Skylab fell out of the sky in 1979.
This part of the story reminded me of Michael Crichton at his most cinematic. It was visually compelling, was driven by a tantalising plausible and deeply threatening extrapolation from real events and current science and it had competent, focused experts coming to save the world. The storytelling was vivid, the sense of threat was high but the subtext was that, tricky as this was, this team could handle it.
The sequence ends with a sample of the threatening organism being lodged safely in a military storage unit, a relic from the cold war, deep inside a mountain in Montana. It reminded me, as I’m sure it was intended to do, of the Ark of the Covenant being stacked in a poorly labelled crate in a government warehouse at the end of Raiders Of The Lost Ark. I wasn’t re-assured.
Most of the story takes place in present-day America and it reminded me of the best of Stephen King. We’re no longer in the gung ho Top Gun mood of the 1980s. We’re in the modern world where it’s not just plausible but almost inevitable that the military storage facility has been sold off, the lower levels sealed and the rest converted into a Self Store manned by two minimum-wage employees who have no knowledge of the threat that they’re sitting on. One is an ex-navy guy who joined the military to avoid going to prison and whose mouth keeps running ahead of his brain and getting him into trouble. The other is a single mom working extra shifts so she can raise the cash to go to college. Meanwhile, our heroes from the Australian desert are now retired and their reports and protocols are gathering dust and global warming is changing the temperature in the storage facility just enough to wake up the bio-threat.
I loved the contrast between saving the world 80s style with square-jawed military heroes in their prime and saving the world in 2019 with two minimum-wage security guards and a sixty-eight-year-old ex-hero with a bad back. Add in a race against the clock to stop a truly scary fungus (I have to admire a writer who really can make me scared of a fungus), a biker gang up to no good in the middle of they night, a widow-lady with a surprise up her sleeve visiting her memories in a storage locker, and a don’t-take-any-risks bureaucrat getting in the way and you have the scope for a lot of fun.
I had a lot of fun with this book. It worked as a techno-thriller and it had the bonus of real people that I could care about at its heart. The humour made things more human but didn’t detract from the sense of threat. The plot was as important as the characters and the two slotted into each other perfectly.
If you’re looking for an entertaining thriller, take a look at Cold Storage. I’m hoping that David Koepp decides to write some more novels. I’ll be first in the queue for them if he does.
Mike Finn's Fiction 