COLD STORAGE

By David Koepp

Like many authors, I have a dismal opinion of the novel-writing abilities of Hollywood screenwriters, especially screenwriters like David Koepp, who wrote such obscure films as “Jurassic Park,” “Spider-Man” and “Mission: Impossible.” Thus it was with a jaundiced eye that I picked up his first novel, “Cold Storage” — a thriller.

Like Michael Crichton, Robin Cook and other thriller writers before him, Koepp has paged through the catalog of dark biology and found something truly delicious: a genus of parasitic fungi that makes Ebola look like the sniffles. It is called Cordyceps, nicknamed the “zombie fungus.” Here’s how it works: An ant, making its happy way along the jungle floor, treads on a spore, which attaches to it and hatches. The fungus grows inside the ant, threads its way to the brain and hijacks it. The zombie ant is seized with the desire to climb up to some high point, where it clamps itself down with its jaws and awaits death. The fungus continues to feed on the ant until it is ready to reproduce. A stalk emerges from the ant’s head and sends up a fruiting body, which ripens, swells and bursts, showering the ground beneath with more spores, which infect more ants, and the cycle continues.

Back to the novel: In 1979, a tank from the first space station, Skylab, falls into a remote town in the Australian outback. It is found by a resident and kept as a souvenir. But there is something growing inside that tank. Over the next eight years it mutates, until in 1987 it finally escapes. This, we learn, is a strain of Cordyceps fungus that, due to its trip into space, has metamorphosed into something that hungers not for ants, but for warm-blooded animals like cats, deer and Homo sapiens. A team of American scientists, dressed in biohazard suits, investigates. They find the little outback town strangely devoid of people — until they realize that everyone has climbed up onto the roofs of the buildings. There, it seems, their living bodies became the fruiting organs of the fungus and burst open — “parted like a suit coat lying on the floor with nobody in it.” The entire area is contaminated with fungal spores.

As the team departs the town with a sample (No, no! Don’t take that sample!) one of the scientists, recalling a nearby radio tower, is seized by the sudden and bizarre urge to climb it. They realize that, even inside her suit, she’s been infected. As the fungus multiplies like mad in her body, she swells and explodes “like a balloon popped by a pin.” Her head, “which in one moment was a disfigured, although recognizable, human head,” was in the next moment “a wash of green gunk that completely covered the inside of her faceplate.”