COLD STORAGE / AUTHOR: DAVID KOEPP / PUBLISHER: HARPER COLLINS / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
David Koepp is a name sure to be familiar to fans of modern blockbuster cinema. He provided the scripts for Jurassic Park, Mission: Impossible, Spider-Man and War of the Worlds, and his films have bagged over $6 billion at the worldwide box office. He knows his way around a high-concept story and he’s brought his very modern, populist storytelling sensibilities to his first novel, a propulsive, energised, graphic and occasionally extremely tongue in cheek story that takes the human race to the very brink of extinction. When the world’s in trouble, who better to save the day than a creaking sixty-something retired bioterror operative, a single mother and an ex-con security guard? Welcome to Cold Storage; buckle up, it’s quite a ride…
In 1979, Skylab crashed to Earth, its debris plunging into the Indian Ocean. However, it appears that some fragments ended up near a remote village in deepest Australia. By 1985, a fungal virus in an oxygen tank has been mutated by a spore of presumably extraterrestrial origin and escaped its confinement, spreading across the village and infecting its inhabitants. It dominates them completely, turns them into its slaves and drives them towards propagation – by causing their bodies to explode and sending its spores out into the air. The remote area is nuked, the fungus stopped in its tracks; but a sample is preserved for examination and stored in a high-security underground Government laboratory. Thirty-plus years later, the facility has been decommissioned and sold off, its upper storeys converted into a routine domestic storage complex, its deeper chambers sealed up and forgotten. But the fungus has been alive and working, across the decades, to grow and develop… and escape.
Cold Storage is huge dumb fun. Koepp doesn’t hang about; the opening chapters set up the scenario and the back story before we’re pitched forward to the modern day and introduced to the frankly rather lowlife core characters grubbing out an existence on the fringes of society, blissfully unaware of the apocalyptic threat building up beneath their feet. There’s no real ‘hero’ figure as such; almost everyone is a coward or a loser or a drunken bum. Teacake, one of the storage unit’s good-natured but feckless security guards, is desperate to turn over a new leaf and harbours a slightly creepy crush on struggling colleague Naomi, who is fighting to keep a roof over her head and provide some stability for her young daughter. Supporting characters are either slobs or thieves apart from Roberto Diaz, the ageing scientist who investigated the Australian incident and who is now the only one who really knows what’s at stake if the oozing, creeping fungus makes its way out into the open air and spreads out across a waiting, witless world.
Koepp’s writing is sharp, smart and snarky. His characters are brought to life in broad, slightly stereotypical brush strokes and the book rushes along at a pace that demands you turn a blind eye to the illogicality of the storyline and occasionally eyebrow-raising turns of the plot and its race-against-time climax. There’s plenty of graphic body horror and a real sense of unstoppable, implacable threat as the fungus infects on touch and quickly turns its victims into something less than human. Cold Storage isn’t a great work of literature but it’s a terrific page-turner, a rampantly pulpy old-school horror / sci-fi hybrid unashamedly written with one eye on the multiplex.
