Cold Storage
By David Koepp
ISBN # 9780062916433
Author’s Website: www.amazon.com/David-Koepp/e/B00FNU9JCW/ref=dp_byline_cont_ebooks_1
Brought to you by OBS reviewer Omar
Summary
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?
Review
Have you ever feared the unknown, monsters under the bed, or maybe aliens? Well, now you will learn the fear of a fungus that is adaptable and wants to devour everything in its way. Cold Storage starts in 1987 with special agents Robert Diaz and Trini Romano driving the recent acquired specimen to a secure storage facility, the specimen is a new fungus called Cordyceps novus. The story of Cordyceps novus starts in 1979 when the Skylab space station falls to Earth and with it the experiments that were sent up to space. One of them was a fungus that evolved into Cordyceps novus. Later on, the tank containing the fungus fell into a small town in Australia where years later, in 1987, was released and killed all 26 inhabitants of the town.
Robert and Trini were able to contain the fungus and burn down any exposure in Australia, but still, they had to save a sample that was sealed in an underground cavern turn military storage.
Years later, in 2019, Cordyceps novus escaped again.
I liked Cold Storage. It was a story that reminded me of scientific and the end of the world movies of the 90s. Having a specific period of time to solve the problem and save everyone are ideas that I like to read, and, in this book, it made the story better. Even better, is when the characters don’t have a clue of what they are doing, and everything goes wrong.
I liked Roberto and Trini the most of all the characters. Sure, the rest of the characters were interesting and fun to follow, but Roberto and Trini are heroes that given their age were very entertaining to read about. At the same time, Naomi and Teacake were a very chaotic duo that together got themselves in trouble. I liked Naomi’s daughter, she was something odd, but funny.
While the idea of a fungus that wants to spread and kill everything was interesting, it didn’t start to scare me until the author started to write the point of view of the Fungus. This changed my perspective of the Cordyceps novus and made it look sentient. I really liked how the author made Cordyceps novus part of the story like any other character.
Cold Storage had great scenes and some funny ones, and others quite gory with all the explosions. But still, I feel that the story had some loose ends. There are parts that could have been explored more, such as information that was mentioned could have been explained better. One of these was the list of seven things that Roberto wrote about where Cordyceps novus had escaped. I also would have liked to know more about Abigail.
At the end, the book was very interesting and a quick read that made it into a good read.
If you are a fan of David Koepp’s work or the movies he has worked on, then I recommend Cold Storage. In this story, when you send a fungus to space, it gets hungry on the way back and starts to consume every living being.
