Cold Storage

I love end-of-the-world stories: Outbreak (virus), Lucifer’s Hammer (meteor strike), The Stand (another virus), Alas,Babylon (nuclear war), The Death of Grass (yet another virus)…the list goes on and on. (And includes the same author's Aurora.)

Now here’s Cold Storage about averting the end of the world. Cordyceps novus is a fungus, birthed in outer space, returned to Earth on a fragment of Skylab that didn’t burn up in the atmosphere, and now intent not only on surviving, but propagating with every piece of living matter it can find. Buried 300 feet underground in a US government bunker and then forgotten when that bunker was decommissioned and sold to the public, it’s now doing its best to infect what lies above: Atchison Storage, open to the public at all hours.

Which is pretty much where the action stays, as the two staff members on duty discover what’s going on, a gang of would-be badass bikers come to buy stolen 4K televisions, and a dead deer and dead cat won’t stay dead.

Perhaps someone (me?) should write a paper about going into a story expecting one thing, finding another, and then ignoring all the good in the story because what you got wasn’t what you expected.

I was expecting global devastation, violence in the streets and every living creatures on Earth succumbing to the crawling, oozing, spreading virus. What I got was a tight little thriller in a confined space, with two interesting and sympathetic main characters, some good jokes, fair amounts of gloopy action at the climax and…

No, I won’t spoil the ending. It’s a great read, and the descriptions of the fungus spreading and thriving are riveting; every organism, after all, just wants – needs – to live and this one does so in truly creepy passages that will have you scratching and itching all over.

But I did miss the global devastation.