So it makes sense that the United States government would send in an elite team to firebomb the village into oblivion. Which leads to death by… explosive means, all within a few minutes. But a fungus only really has one motive, which is to make more fungus, and so eventually the body in question cannot contain it. “It spreads into every portion of the brain until it controls movement, reflex, impulse,” a scientist dispatched to the village explains, until it even controls the host’s thoughts. The fungus in question lands on our planet via Skylab, crash-landing on space junk in a remote part of Australia in 1979, only to be released in a tiny village eight years later, killing everyone in acutely brutal fashion. Which raises the stakes – and the fun – immeasurably. In Koepp’s world, however, the shark is a fungus.Īnd the humans in peril aren’t just the folks dumb enough to go in the water… it’s all of us.
Screenwriter David Koepp knows his way around a big-concept, crowd-pleasing, high-energy and every-other-hyphenate-thriller, responsible as he is for tentpole adaptations like “Jurassic Park,” “Spider-Man” and “Angels & Demons,” as well as original screenplays for “Carlito’s Way,” “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” and the most recent installment of the Jack Ryan saga, “Shadow Recruit,” among many others.Īnd yet the book (and movie) that is most analogous to Koepp’s engaging debut novel, "Cold Storage" (Ecco, 320 pp., ★★★ out of four stars), 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.
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