GREAT GREEN GOBS OF GREASY, GRIMY ZOMBIE GUTS
Writer David Koepp’s name is strongly associated with three better-known creative geniuses: Stephen King, Michael Crichton, and Steven Spielberg. Koepp (pictured above) is best-known as a screenwriter, and he scripted both the 1993 film Jurassic Park and its 1997 sequel The Lost World: Jurassic Park, both of which were directed by Spielberg and based on novels by Crichton. Koepp scripted, or co-scripted, several other Spielberg films, including War of the Worlds and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Koepp also wrote and directed the 2004 film Secret Window, which was based on Stephen King’s novella Secret Window, Secret Garden, collected in the 1990 book Four Past Midnight. What’s more, Koepp wrote and directed the 1999 horror film Stir of Echoes, which is based on a novel by Richard Matheson, whom King has credited with being a major influence on his own work, perhaps even the major influence on his work. Born in 1963, Koepp is one of the best screenwriters of his generation. Among my favorites of his scripts are Panic Room, Premium Rush, Ghost Town, Kimi, You Should Have Left, and the aforementioned Secret Window.
Ever since the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 (technically it arrived in 2019, but most of us didn’t know it then), I have been eager to find good books about worldwide medical disasters that threaten the whole human race. In previous essays I have written about The Black Death (1977) by Gwyneth Cravens and John S. Marr, an intelligent (despite the lurid paperback cover) novel that speculated on what might have happened if a plague had broken out in New York City back in the 1970s, and about Mr. Adam (1946), a seriocomic book by Pat Frank that, decades before P.D. James tackled the same subject in The Children of Men, speculated on what might happen if every man on earth were suddenly rendered unable to sire children. Both The Black Death and Mr. Adam were entertaining but neither was quite as thrilling as I had hoped it would be. Last year, I finally got around to reading Lawrence Wright’s novel The End of October, which was published in April of 2020 (though obviously begun years earlier) and eerily foresaw some of the failings and flailings of the various public-health organizations that characterized the actual pandemic of 2020 (and beyond). The pandemic which drives the plot of The End of October is much deadlier and more devastating than our own real pandemic turned out to be (though ours was bad enough). Wright’s book was brilliantly researched, as you would expect from a highly decorated journalist, and I found many of its details about doctors and diseases to be fascinating. Alas, I found the story to be a bit draggy and the characters somewhat flat (Wright has written two other novels, and I enjoyed The End of October just enough that I will probably give his fiction another try). If it had been written by Michael Crichton, the characters would still have been flat, but the book would have been compressed into a shorter timeline and would have had much more velocity. I read (or at least started reading) a few other books that I hoped might satisfy my jones for contagion literature – Toxin by Robin Cook, Contagion also by Cook, Blood Stream by Tess Gerritsen – but couldn’t find anything that ranked with such icons of the genre as Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain or King’s The Stand. In desperation, I decided to re-read The Andromeda Strain, a book I hadn’t read since the 1970s. Big mistake. Published in 1969, the year NASA landed a man on the moon, Andromeda is about an extraterrestrial contaminant brought to earth when a military satellite crashes near a small Arizona town. The contaminant kills nearly everyone in the town. Left unchecked, the contaminant could wipe out all life on earth. This was (and is) a great set up for a techno-thriller (some pop-fiction authorities consider The Andromeda Strain to be the first truly modern techno-thriller). It seemed especially pertinent during those early days of the Space Race. The Andromeda Strain was the first novel Crichton published under his own name, though he had already published five novels under pseudonyms, including the Edgar-Award-winning A Case of Need (as “Jeffrey Hudson”). It became the fifth bestselling novel of 1969, just a few rungs below such massive sellers as Portnoy’s Complaint and The Godfather. It remains readable, but time hasn’t been especially kind to it. Crichton was never celebrated for his ability to create memorable characters. He never gave us a Huckleberry Finn or a Scarlett O’Hara or a Holden Caufield. I’m a big fan of his, but I’d be hard-pressed to name five characters from his collected works. What he gave us were some brilliantly inventive plots, thrilling stories that were generally played out over a very tight timeline of just a few days, and a lot of great technological what-ifs: What if dinosaurs could be recreated using contemporary cloning technology?; What if an alien space ship were found at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean?; What if nanotechnology ran rampant and created swarms of deadly nanobots? The Andromeda Strain is fueled by a great what-if, but it is an early Crichton work and the characters in it are probably the most wooden he ever created. It’s difficult to feel anything for them. Many of the pages of the book (as in other Crichton novels) are filled with false documents – computer readouts, government manuals, military protocols, etc. The false document technique has a long and distinguished history, and has worked well in books such as Jack Higgins’s The Eagle Has Landed and Frederick Forsyth’s The Odessa File. But the false documents in The Andromeda Strain (as in Airframe and other later Crichton novels) often just look like computer gobbledy-gook to untrained eyes like my own. After re-reading Andromeda, I felt mostly disappointment, as well as a futile wish that Crichton had opted to rewrite the book later in his career, sometime in the late 1990s, say, by which time he was pretty much at the peak of his powers as America’s greatest writer of techno-thrillers. I was about to give up my search for another great contagion novel when, in January of this year, at a local used-book store, I happened across The Cobra Event by Richard Preston.
Preston’s 1994 nonfiction work The Hot Zone was billed as a terrifying true story about the Ebola virus. Stephen King called it “one of the most horrifying things I’ve read in my whole life.” A nonfiction fan of my acquaintance read it and urged me to do so back when the book was first published. Alas, I’m a fiction junkie, so I never got around to reading The Hot Zone. I was aware of the fact that Preston went on to publish other books, but I foolishly assumed that all of these were also nonfiction books about science, so I paid no attention to them. But, while browsing in a Sacramento bookstore called The Bookworm, I found a Preston book called The Cobra Event shelved in the fiction section. I pulled it from the shelves, discovered it was a novel about a deadly contagion, and I decided to give it a go. I burned through it in just a couple of days. So far, it is the best thriller I’ve read this year. It’s sure to win a Mimsie Award, so I will write more about it in detail when I publish my annual essay about the best books I have read over the previous year. Suffice it to say that the book combined the best elements of Thomas Harris’s oeuvre (sick and twisted villain with a genius-level brain) with the best of Crichton’s oeuvre (techno-terror story compressed into a very short timeline for maximum suspense). The Cobra Event was so good that I once again wanted to find more excellent contagion novels. Which brings us back to David Koepp.
In 2019, thirty-one years after his first screenplay was produced, Koepp published his first novel, a contagion thriller called Cold Storage. His timing was impeccable. The book was published in September, just two months before the first known case of COVID-19 came to light. But Cold Storage doesn’t concern a virus. The contagion at the heart of Koepp’s novel is, instead, a fungus. This was a wise choice on his part. Viruses are impossible to see with the naked eye (although their horrifying impacts on a human body can be vividly depicted in such books as The Cobra Event and The Andromeda Strain), but everyone knows what a fungus looks like. We’ve all seen plenty of creepy-looking mushrooms springing up from the ground after a rain. We’ve seen mold spores climbing the walls of neglected buildings. Koepp’s deadly fungus is green and grows rapidly. It takes over the brain of its host – be it a cat, a deer, or a human being – and yet allows the creature to go on existing in a zombie-like state, moving around with just one goal in mind: to find other creatures to infect and feast upon. When it does find a small population of infectible creatures, it either uses a nasty green spray of projectile vomit to target specific individuals for contamination, or else it just causes its current host’s body to explode, spraying the contaminant in all directions. In either case, the scenes in which zombified creatures attempt to spread the growth of the fungus are always enjoyably disgusting.
Koepp’s novel isn’t quite as intelligent nor as believable as Preston’s The Cobra Event. But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t intelligent. Koepp clearly did his homework. His afterword acknowledges the assistance of about a dozen scientific experts. The book contains plenty of interesting facts about fungi. But more than anything, it demonstrates Koepp’s familiarity with the works of Stephen King and Michael Crichton. Cold Storage doesn’t reach the pop-fictional heights of Jurassic Park or The Shining, but it reads like a good midlevel work by either King or Crichton, or perhaps a collaboration of the two (if only). It’s the equal of thrillers such as Cujo or Sphere. Koepp was clearly influenced by The Andromeda Strain. The killer fungus of the novel arrives on earth when Skylab (a real-life NASA space station) crashes in Western Australia in July of 1979. The fungus kills off all the residents of a very small Australian town, just as the contaminant in Andromeda killed off nearly every resident of a small Arizona town. In both books, the military is called in to thoroughly firebomb the small town so as to destroy the contaminant. In both books, a small sample of the contaminant is collected and put into deep storage at a government facility. In both books, the contaminant learns how to rapidly evolve in order to escape from its supposedly secure vault. So far, so Crichtonesque. But fairly quickly, Koepp’s novel evolves into something more closely resembling the work of Stephen King. Like the cemetery in King’s Pet Sematary, the fungus can bring dead creatures – cats, humans, etc. – back to some semblance of life, but it isn’t a form of life that anyone would likely desire for himself or a loved one. Although the novel satisfies the requirements of both the techno-thriller and horror genres, for most of its length it leans far more heavily into the horror aspects of the tale. It reads as if Crichton came up with the basic outline of the plot and then King fleshed it out (and there is plenty of corrupted and exploding flesh in the novel). This is not to suggest that Koepp plagiarized anything by King or Crichton. Cold Storage is an original novel that, like many good pop fictions, borrows from a variety of different genres and sources. Koepp’s characters are better drawn that most of Crichton’s but perhaps not as memorable as King’s best creations: Jack Torrance of The Shining, Annie Wilkes in Misery, etc. After a brief section that takes place back in 1987, the action of the novel, as in most Crichton novels, is compressed into a very tight timeline, which heightens the suspense and gives the book tremendous velocity. Koepp is able to do this only by giving the fungus an almost ridiculously extreme ability to rapidly mutate and adapt to pretty much any environment it finds itself in. But this is just fine. The book is meant to entertain. In fact, it is quite funny at times, and has plenty of amusing dialog. It is no insult (from me, at least) to note that the novel was almost certainly written with a film adaptation in mind (and, indeed, the film is in the works). Koepp has ably adapted the works of plenty of other writers for the screen. There’s no reason he shouldn’t be allowed to tell an original story in novel form and then adapt it for the screen as well.
Cold Storage didn’t quite measure up to the pop-fictional brilliance of The Cobra Event, which in my opinion is nearly the equal of Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs. But in many ways it was just more fun to read. Garish green fungi colonizing the bodies of human beings and then swelling up their host’s bodies and sending out an explosion of highly toxic phosphorescent goo in all directions is about as much fun as you can ever find in the pages of a good pop-fiction contagion novel. Both The Cobra Event and Cold Storage are first novels. And both are better than the first novels of either King (Carrie) or Crichton (The Andromeda Strain, at least if we count only those under his real name). I’ve already ordered a copy of Koepp’s second novel, Aurora, published in 2022. Curiously, despite how brilliant The Cobra Event is, Preston has yet to produce a solo sophomore novel. His only other work of fiction is Micro, a novel that he – sort of – collaborated on with none other than Michael Crichton. Crichton apparently had been working on the novel for quite a while at the time of his death in 2008. After his death, Crichton’s notes and completed chapters were turned over to Preston, who finished the job. Just how much of the book is Crichton’s work and how much is Preston’s I don’t know. I attempted to read it (it deals, as the title suggests, with a technological process that can shrink things – including human beings – down to a fraction of their original size) shortly after it was published, but couldn’t get into it. At that point, the name Richard Preston didn’t mean anything to me. After reading and loving The Cobra Event, I went back recently and gave Micro another shot, this time convinced that I was going to love it. Alas, I wasn’t able to finish it. Perhaps, I’ll give it another try at some later date (Steven Spielberg is reportedly developing a film version). In the meantime, Richard Preston, if you are reading this, please get to work on another solo novel. A nation of epidemic-curious readers turns its lonely eyes to you.
And as for you, David Koepp, keep writing movies, novels, or whatever else suits your fancy. I’m on board for anything. Just keep the green goo coming.