
Cold Storage Delivers a Cinematic Experience
The guy who put this book on the table is the screenwriter behind movies like Jurassic Park and Spider-Man. What does that mean? Clearly, that Cold Storage feels like a movie.
A B-movie.
A low-budget B-movie set in a few locations.
But hey, wait a minute!
It’s one of the good ones. Okay, the basic premise of Cold Storage is entirely clichéd: a new, aggressive fungus starts spreading in an abandoned military storage facility. The smooth-talking underdog with a good heart, his dream girl, and the slightly over-the-hill, retired problem-solver take up the fight against it.
David Koepp’s main antagonist is a mushroom – and no joke!
However, you know David Koepp is a real pro because in about two minutes, you start liking all the main characters (and by about page 70, you start seriously worrying about Travis and Naomi). You even start to like the antagonist, who is, well… a fungus colony. Thanks to the brilliant, and not to mention very funny, personification, the FUNGUS soon becomes a character in its own right. (Other characters include a headless cockroach and a dead deer.)
While this might sound like a parody at first, it’s really not. The humor in David Koepp’s book lies in the casual, sarcastic writing style that often makes it impossible not to smile.
Fast as a fungus!
Perhaps the only negative aspect concerns the fungus’s spreading speed. As is generally known, this tends to be rather SLOW. Unlike our fungus, which proves to be a real sprinter in Cold Storage. If you’re not in shape and don’t move your feet fast enough, it’ll easily outpace you. So, the spread of the fungus could have been handled more creatively. But let that be our biggest problem!
Rating: 7.9/10
Cold Storage by David Koepp
308 pages, Hardcover
Published in 2019 by Harper