... Koepp has paged through the catalog of dark biology and found something truly delicious: a genus of parasitic fungi that makes Ebola look like the sniffles ... This is a classic thriller in the tradition of Crichton and Richard Preston ... if you relish, as I do, horrendous and revolting descriptions of distended bodies writhing and heaving and ribcages bursting open with the sound of snapping sticks and guts flying into the faces of dumbfounded people, and if you like the image of unwholesome green globules of fungus bubbling along the ground toward a paralyzed scientist, then this is the thriller for you. But Koepp is better than Crichton in three significant ways: He writes well, he has a wicked sense of humor and his characters are so keenly, intelligently and even movingly drawn that they might have stepped out of a literary novel. On every level, Cold Storage is pure, unadulterated entertainment.
In Cold Storage, David Koepp easily transfers to novel from his experience as the screenwriter of such recognizable movies as Jurassic Park and War of the Worlds, giving this story the sense of immediacy and danger those films contain ... He also gives the reader an extensive biography of the more notable characters, so we are not only familiar with them but will ultimately be touched with their fates. No one is simply introduced and immediately dispatched/written out without us knowing his name, occupation, and various eccentricities. Cold Storage is one of the most intriguing, frightening, yet entertaining novels of this genre this reviewer has read in a long time. Easy to read, easy to understand, its characters are enjoyable, brave, clever, and surprisingly funny in the face of catastrophe.
Thankfully, with this tale Koepp doesn't go down the well-worn path of brain munching and guns blazing. Instead, he tries to take the familiar genre down a road more rooted in scientific realism, through with a wealth of balls-to-the-wall suspense ... Cold Storage isn't too heavy on character development ... Fortunately, the writing more than makes up for this; Koepp has experience in the sci-fi/horror genre, so he knows how to go full throttle on the action without crashing the plot. And even with all the big science words that he throws around, Koepp keeps the story easy to follow, much like a movie (something Paramount took note of, so it snapped up the rights and has a film version in development). Koepp also throws in a lot of humor, not all of which always works, but it makes the story more interesting nonetheless. Cold Storage is a good summer read that you can knock out now and then look forward to revisiting when it comes to a multiplex near you.
The story line in Cold Storage by David Koepp, the screenwriter for films including Jurassic Park and Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man, invokes classic horror films such as the 1982 version of The Thing and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Paranoia and mayhem ensue. Koepp’s writing gets a bit gruesome at times, but he knows how to invoke chilling scenes with memorable characters. It’s clear he has a background in screenplays because the novel has a cinematic flair to the entire tale. It’s scary, and a great deal of fun.
...a classic nerve-shredder, written with all the pace and sudden switches you would expect from a screenwriter like Mr. Koepp ... The threat builds exponentially ...We get to see things the way the fungus sees them as well, or anyway perceives them. If there’s a moral, it’s a good sci-fi one: We’ve gotten used to things being OK, but humanity can’t afford to drop its guard. Not all fungi move slow.
...the book (and movie) that is most analogous to Koepp’s engaging debut novel, Cold Storage...is Peter Benchley’s iconic Jaws. In both cases, humans are put in peril by the evolutionary imperatives of a wild creature, which is particularly frightening since you can’t argue or reason with natural selection ... the humans in peril aren’t just the folks dumb enough to go in the water… it’s all of us. Which raises the stakes—and the fun—immeasurably. If you find profound anxiety fun.
... has a decidedly cinematic quality ... Koepp establishes a complex grid of relationships among his characters. He also eludes easy expectations: he does a variation on a familiar scene, in which someone is unwittingly infected by a sinister organism—but in his telling, the person infected immediately figures out what’s gone wrong, and acts accordingly ... Koepp does take advantage of the structure of the novel...But aside from the novel’s blockbuster tendencies, there’s also a gleefully bleak sense of humor running below the surface of the novel, which makes for some of its most memorable scenes ... It’s a familiar scenario: the unlikely ensemble who are the world’s last hope, even if they don’t realize it. But Koepp’s storytelling chops keep this narrative from ever falling too far into cliche—and when he starts to, there’s also bizarre body horror aplenty to offset it. And thankfully, Koepp also understands that having a ragtag group of heroes trying to save the world only resonates if you actually care about the characters. In the end, he does; in the end, he makes the stakes feel real.
This is a terrific thriller: ambitious, audacious, gory, scary, flamboyant, and funny. All good thrillers need a villain, and this one has a doozy—a highly adaptive fungus with an evolutionary imperative: reproduce and spread as fast as possible ... In his first novel, Koepp, a deservedly renowned screenwriter...does what many screenwriters have failed to do: make a seamless, massively effective transition from the visual medium to the literary. The book doesn’t read like a modestly beefed-up pitch for a movie; it’s a rich, textured, and downright impossible-to-put-down story that will rock horror-thriller fans’ worlds
Koepp builds a tight plot as the three race against time and the fungus, a fictional but all-too-convincing monster of an organism that, if it escapes, could bring on global extinctions. Roberto, Travis, and Naomi are engaging, believable characters. Koepp is skilled at sharp, often humorous dialogue, and Roberto’s discovery of the physical barriers to being a hero at age 68 is both darkly funny and an effective source of suspense ... [a] taut, mordant thriller debut.
Screenwriter and director Koepp makes his fiction debut with a sensational SF thriller ... Breakneck pacing and nonstop action compensate for the predictable story line and the occasional contrivance. Michael Crichton fans won’t want to miss this one.
