Review: Cold Storage by David Koepp
Title: Cold Storage
Author: David Koepp
Publication Date: September 3, 2019
Publisher: Harper
Genre: Suspense/Thriller, Sci-Fi
Find It: Goodreads, Amazon, B&N, Book Depository. Bookshop
Source: Borrowed
Rating: 3 stars – stick to your bedtime
For readers of Andy Weir and Noah Hawley comes an astonishing debut by the screenwriter of Jurassic Park: a wild and terrifying adventure about three strangers who must work together to contain a highly contagious, deadly organism.
When Pentagon bioterror operative Roberto Diaz was sent to investigate a suspected biochemical attack, he found something far worse: a highly mutative organism capable of extinction-level destruction. He contained it and buried it in cold storage deep beneath a little-used military repository.
Now, after decades of festering in a forgotten sub-basement, the specimen has found its way out and is on a lethal feeding frenzy. Only Diaz knows how to stop it.
He races across the country to help two unwitting security guards—one an ex-con, the other a single mother. Over one harrowing night, the unlikely trio must figure out how to quarantine this horror again. All they have is luck, fearlessness, and a mordant sense of humor. Will that be enough to save all of humanity?
After violently killing all of the inhabitants of a small Australian town, a mutating fungus is contained and buried deep within the sub-basement of a military owned cold storage facility. Decades after being locked away, the fungus has found its way to the surface and only two young employees and an aging Federal agent stand between it and a worldwide pandamic.
Cold Storage is the biological thriller about a fungus that infects its host from the inside out, turning them into mindless and horrifying creatures intent on spreading the virus further. As a fan of bio thrillers and real life stories about infectious diseases and viruses, I was really excited to get this book last year. It’s also written by Jurassic Park screenwriter David Koepp so I had high hopes for it.
I am finding it really difficult to write this review. I really wanted to like it a lot more than I did, which isn’t to say that I didn’t enjoy it. I liked a lot of things about it, like the intro which I thought was pretty terrifying. Seeing the initial effects of the virus and what it does is super scary and sets up the rest of the book well. I liked the chapters told from the POV of the fungus. While the “voice” of the fungus was a little primitive, it definitely gave the book a unique spin and it was really interesting to imagine what a virus might be “thinking” on its path to propagate. Koepp does a great job of keeping the tension high and I found it really hard to put the book down.
The main characters didn’t do much for me. Teacake and Naomi were fine and I was rooting for them but they also felt very two dimensional. Roberto was fine but again, I didn’t feel any huge connection to him. Most of the other characters were just fodder for the fungus so you’re kind of glad to see them go.
While I didn’t expect this to be a super realistic story, I still felt like a lot of it was a little too unbelievable. There are a lot of close calls and dumb luck seemed to prevail. Overall Cold Storage a fun story if you don’t look too closely at the science and just want to be entertained. Koepp definitely knows how to ramp up the tension and keep you on the edge of your seat. You will probably enjoy it more if you don’t come into it with too many expectations. It was a fun read but not one I’m likely to pick up ever again.
