Book Review: Aurora by David Koepp

 

Aurora by David Koepp  

289 pages, Hardcover  

June 2022 by Harper

If you read reviews on my blog for a long time then you might notice a pattern, it is the retro sci-fi books that are often history lessons on the author and their place in the canon. Often, I am making a case for why this writer is important. The more modern books are often under the hood look at the tactics the modern storyteller uses. That is an excuse for me to study the state-of-the-art methods of my favorite authors. That is why the interviews on the podcast that goes with this blog are so nuts and bolts about storytelling.

This review is going to be a blend of those things. The reason why this will be a part history lesson is David Koepp is a respected screenwriter, and one of my favorites but somehow remains underrated. Now you may be wondering how can a writer who is responsible for some of the high grossest movies of all time be underrated? The thing is when you write scripts for Spielberg (Jurassic Park & War of the Worlds), David Fincher (Panic Room), Brian Depalma (Snake Eyes), Steven Soderberg (Kimi), and Rami (Spider-man) the writer is not really the one who gets the credit or is remembered.

That said David Koepp is a favorite of mine not because of those scripts, although I am a huge fan of Panic Room which is a masterclass in building suspense and tension. It is the underrated movies that Koepp has written and directed. Stir of Echoes (which got overshadowed by being released shortly after The Sixth Sense) is a horror masterpiece.  It was hilarious to me that Koepp faithfully adapted a novel written in the 50s and lazy filmgoers thought he was ripping off M.Night. Please…

Stir of Echoes is a masterpiece for many reasons. It is the best adaptation of Richard Matheson not adapted by the man himself. It took a story written in the 50s and smartly updated it to take place in 1999 seamlessly. He did that and most importantly it was scary at the same time. In a career of amazing performances, it was a stand-out role for Kevin Bacon.  Koepp also did a smart adaptation of a lesser Stephen King novella  Secret Window that despite being a recycled Dark Half he managed to make do the rare act of improving the story in the film.

Premium Rush with Joseph Gordan Levitt is an underrated thriller. It was his return to horror with Kevin Bacon in an early pandemic release You Should Have Left adapting a German horror novel that I really loved. It is a great combination of Panic Room and Stir of Echoes. Perfect for Koepp’s skills.

Koepp after all is great at details that build suspense. It is why he worked so well with a Matheson story as that is a strength they share. Koepp is always thinking about how character moments can build out the story and keep the audience/reader nervous. Koepp keeps you just slightly ahead of the character, like that moment when you are about to stub your toe but it is too late to avoid it. The Koepp story exists in a gasp before impact.

I was excited when I heard he was writing novels. It is long story of why I missed his first novel, I am going to fix that but here we are. Aurora is David Koepp’s second effort in prose but he is such a gifted storyteller you will detect no growing pains. This novel shares a title with my vote for best Science Fiction novel of the 21st century in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora, but they are very different novels. I admit that might become confusing for me. It appears Koepp’s Aurora is being marketed as a thriller. It is fair to call it an end-of-the-world thriller, a collapse thriller or a science fiction thriller.

I am a believer in wider scopes within a genre and this is a speculative novel, in an undeniable way. The maguffin of the story happens in space and the story hinges on science. Harper Collins might not have put the label Science Fiction on it but that is what it is. David Koepp has no problem writing rich three-dimensional characters that balance nicely with his other storytelling chops.

Aurora is the story of a CME, a coronal mass ejection. Bill Nye the science guy just did a fantastic episode of the End is NYE (on Peacock) about this potential disaster. Imagine a solar flare sends a pretty but destructive light show into our atmosphere and plays havoc with our magnetic field and fry most of the electronic transformers and brings down the grid. This is a very real possible looming disaster, something NASA is devoting research into trying to predict.  What would this event do to society and why is it a setup for an SF thriller?

Consider this scene when Aubrey's shady junkie ex walks into a Casino. "It was busy today, for sure, a lot of last hands being played, and the big-screens TVs all around the place were tuned to sporting events. Unless you knew already, you'd have no idea ten thousand billion metric tons of highly charged coronal mass were headed toward the earth at just over six million miles per hour."

You may want to keep doing your normal but society is suddenly going dark which would cause many a crisis. This firmly puts Aurora in the sub-genre of warning novels. While most associated during the cold war with nuclear warning classics the warning novel is most often used to highlight fears of the Climate Crisis. A blackout is the theme of Koepp’s underrated first film The Trigger Effect from the 90s about an LA blackout. About a decade ago William R. Forstchen in his fantastic novel One Second After laid out all the worst cases and made a super scary novel.  One thing I like about Koepp’s Aurora it is a thriller and exciting but it doesn’t present all the most brutal worst-case options.

A lesson he repeats from his War of the Worlds script (one I think inspired Stephen  King’s Cell BTW) is not to focus on generals or leaders just ground zero of one family. In this case a Brother and sister. The brother is the ultra-rich Thom and his sister is Aubrey Wheeler. The dynamic between the two is the heart of the story that uses one of my two favorite keys to stories -  parallels and reversals. The parallel at the heart of this novel is Thom the wealthy prepared prepper, who ends up alone and hiding and his sister who has few resources and didn’t prepare who thrives. That is the reversal.

Koepp uses his strength for suspense and details to create creepy moments that signal everything has changed. When the Aurora comes the neighbors all go out to watch the light show, and for a bit, the power stays on, and people ignore the warnings thinking the media was fear-mongering. Like the moments when the storm passed and NOLA thought they escaped Katrina. The moment the power goes out is not a huge moment but subtle and creepy.

"In the living room of Aubrey's house, the seventy-seven-inch Sony TV winked, unceremoniously, and went dark. Scott, who had fallen asleep on the couch, failed to notice."

Aubrey has not always made the best choices, her junkie ex-husband  Rusty knows her brother has money and if he wants. His the live-wire character that you know is going to be the source of problems. This is where Koepp puts us ahead of the characters wanting to scream "Don't do it!"

One excellent part of this book that might go underrated is how the characters as they are introduced don't seem to have any relationship with each other. Koepp does weave the characters together nicely including the one government official in the story who Thom happens upon in an Iowa gas station. This is an excellently written scene in the final act, where we know more about the two characters than they know about each other thus giving us great tension.

Aurora is a sneaky good novel. The concept is not groundbreaking. There is nothing that makes me think that I have to tell everyone they can't miss it. To me, it is a page-turner for one major reason. This is a storyteller driving a few narrative threads perfectly in the dance of parallels and reversals. This might is a storyteller's story for that reason.  So for me, it is a 5-star novel that gently warns us about a potential crisis with suspense and a little humor, and hope. That is something that most warning novels don't or can't do.    


Oh, wait before we go... Speaking of Matheson I want to also note that Koepp gives a tip of the hat to the author when the character Perry St.John mentions "He could create fortress Perry right here in Bethesda. Maybe he'd turn into a sorta-latter-day Robert Neville, the hero of Perry's favorite book of all time, I Am Legend, the famous last man on earth, fighting his lonely battle with a world of vampires. It worked out OK for Neville, forging and killing in the daytime, building a house full of booby traps, the book had made it sound kinda fun, well until the ending."

As a massive Matheson fan I had to shout out this scene.