Readers sometimes ask how much of the science in Storm Damage is real.
The reassuring answer is that the drugs called Rapture and Zombie do not exist.
The less reassuring answer is that many of the ingredients needed to imagine them do.
In Storm Damage, ordinary people suddenly commit horrifying acts of violence. Meanwhile, Eric Young, the guitarist in Sonny Marshall’s band, takes two blue pills at a party and becomes trapped in a state of unending euphoria. His dopamine remains abnormally elevated, his face freezes into a beatific smile, and his mind seems to depart for a pleasant destination without leaving a forwarding address. Later, investigators discover another drug — Zombie — that produces rage, paranoia, hallucinations, and murderous aggression. Both are designer drugs created by a gifted biochemist who has apparently decided that traditional villainy lacks sufficient laboratory equipment.
I invented the drugs.
I did not invent the neurological systems they attack.
Rapture and the Brain’s Reward System
Rapture begins with dopamine, a neurotransmitter central to motivation, reinforcement, learning, and the brain’s reward circuitry. Dopamine is often described as the pleasure chemical, although that is an oversimplification. It is involved not only in pleasure but in teaching the brain that something is worth pursuing again.
Food can activate that system. So can sex, social approval, gambling, and many addictive drugs. Cocaine produces its intense effects partly by blocking dopamine transporters — the molecular cleanup crews that normally remove dopamine from the space between neurons. With the transporters blocked, dopamine accumulates, prolonging the signal and producing increased energy, alertness, confidence, and euphoria.
The brain, however, dislikes being treated like a nightclub with the music turned up permanently. Repeated surges of dopamine can alter reward circuitry, making natural pleasures less satisfying and drug-seeking more compulsive. That is one reason addiction is not simply a failure of character. The drug changes the system making the decisions.
Rapture takes that real mechanism and pushes it far beyond current pharmacology. The fictional drug prevents the brain from ending an extreme dopamine response. Its victims do not merely experience a short-lived high. They remain suspended in chemically enforced bliss, sometimes conscious but disconnected, as if the brain’s reward switch has been jammed in the “on” position.
Could a real drug do that indefinitely?
Probably not in the clean, precise way Rapture does in the novel. A compound that drove dopamine activity to extreme levels for an extended period would be more likely to produce a medical catastrophe than serene, permanent happiness. Depending on the mechanism and dose, the consequences might include agitation, psychosis, dangerous changes in heart rate and blood pressure, seizures, hyperthermia, movement disorders, neuronal injury, coma, or death.
A permanent high sounds attractive only until one remembers that the brain is also responsible for eating, speaking, recognizing loved ones, playing guitar, and knowing that clothing is generally expected in restaurants.
Rapture is therefore fictional, but it is grounded in a real possibility: a chemist can design molecules that alter neurotransmitter release, receptor activity, reuptake, metabolism, or several of those processes at once. The farther the compound pushes the system, the less likely the result is to resemble happiness and the more likely it is to resemble toxic neurological collapse.
Storm Damage gives Eric’s crash in flat, clinical language, which is what makes it land — Sonny visiting him in the hospital days later:
The doctors knew he ingested something with the cocaine, but they didn’t know what. The toxicology report was inconclusive. It showed the presence of cocaine along with two other compounds they couldn’t identify. Eric’s dopamine levels remained abnormally high, and they couldn’t explain why. He was on a forever high — a permanent state of rapture.
I recalled the beatific smile on his face at the club. Now it looked frozen, like a Halloween mask of a demented clown.
That is what happens to Eric. He receives bliss without agency. The drug gives him pleasure while taking away the person capable of experiencing a meaningful life.
Zombie and the Pharmacy in a Poisonous Weed
Zombie arose from a different branch of pharmacology.
In Storm Damage, toxicologists initially find an unfamiliar alkaloid resembling hyoscyamine in the blood of people who abruptly become paranoid and violent. Hyoscyamine is found in Datura stramonium, better known as jimsonweed. The plant also contains atropine and scopolamine. Together, these compounds can produce severe anticholinergic poisoning.
“Anticholinergic” does not sound menacing. It sounds like something prescribed for seasonal drainage.
It can be extremely menacing.
Acetylcholine is a neurotransmitter used throughout the body and brain. Drugs that block certain acetylcholine receptors can be medically useful. Related compounds are used to reduce intestinal spasms, dilate pupils, prevent motion sickness, decrease secretions during surgery, and treat specific neurological or cardiac problems.
Dosage, however, is the line separating medicine from mayhem.
Datura poisoning can cause confusion, memory loss, disorientation, hallucinations, agitation, psychosis, delirium, seizures, coma, and cardiovascular collapse. Victims may develop dilated pupils, flushed skin, dry mouth, urinary retention, rapid heartbeat, fever, and bizarre behavior. The plant’s principal toxic compounds — atropine, hyoscyamine, and scopolamine — interfere with muscarinic acetylcholine signaling in the brain and peripheral nervous system.
This is not the pleasant, kaleidoscopic experience often associated with popular ideas about hallucinogens. Anticholinergic delirium can make people unable to distinguish hallucination from reality. A person may converse with someone who is not there, fight imaginary attackers, fail to recognize family members, or become violently agitated.
That made jimsonweed a useful scientific ancestor for Zombie.
The drug in the novel is not simply crushed Datura slipped into someone’s latte. It is a fictional engineered compound designed to create an especially malignant anticholinergic state: paranoia, rage, hallucinations, loss of inhibition, and a sense that other people are threatening or less than human.
Real Datura poisoning can include agitation and aggression, but it does not reliably convert a peaceful banker into a precision-targeted mass murderer. Human behavior is too complicated, and intoxication is too unpredictable. Some victims become combative. Others become incoherent, terrified, unconscious, or medically unstable.
Zombie is therefore an extrapolation. It takes a real toxic syndrome and imagines a chemist refining it — reducing the random incapacitation while amplifying fear, aggression, and paranoid misinterpretation.
That is the fictional leap: not that a chemical can produce violent delirium, but that someone could tune the effect with such appalling accuracy.
The novel’s own toxicologist, Dom, explains the mechanism to Sonny and Kat in language a reader can actually follow:
“These chemicals affect a part of the brain called the amygdala, which regulates emotions,” Dom said. “Alcohol is thought to excite the amygdala. Oxytocin inhibits it. Your drug, Zombie, in a high enough dose, could hijack the victim’s amygdala and cause uncontrollable rage. At the same time, it suppresses the prefrontal cortex, which regulates judgment. The combination would cause uninhibited aggression.”
Designer Drugs: Chemistry’s Moving Target
The term “designer drug” sounds stylish, as though the pill arrived from Milan and should be worn with the right shoes.
It usually means something less elegant: a chemical compound has been created or modified to mimic, intensify, or alter the effects of an existing drug. A small molecular change may affect how strongly the compound binds to a receptor, how quickly it reaches the brain, how long it remains active, how the body metabolizes it, or whether standard toxicology tests recognize it.
This creates a perpetual game of chemical whack-a-mole. Authorities identify and prohibit one compound. A clandestine chemist changes part of its molecular structure. The new substance may remain pharmacologically active while falling outside existing testing libraries or legal definitions — at least temporarily.
That uncertainty appears throughout Storm Damage. Hospitals know something has happened to Eric but cannot initially identify the unfamiliar compounds in his blood. Standard toxicology tests are excellent when investigators know what they are looking for. They are less magical when confronted with a molecule no laboratory has catalogued.
A toxicology report is not a tiny Sherlock Holmes wearing safety goggles. It compares samples against known chemical signatures. A genuinely novel compound may require more sophisticated analytical work before scientists can determine its structure and mechanism.
The Blood-Brain Barrier Problem
A villain designing psychoactive drugs faces another difficulty: the brain is protected.
The blood-brain barrier is formed by tightly joined cells lining cerebral blood vessels. It limits the movement of many substances from the bloodstream into brain tissue. That is generally good. Without it, every questionable substance we consumed would have direct access to the central nervous system, and gas-station sushi would become an even greater gamble.
In Storm Damage, the designer combines Rapture and Zombie with other substances intended to accelerate absorption and help the active compounds cross the blood-brain barrier. The repeated delivery system becomes a chemical signature linking the two drugs to the same creator.
The novel puts the explanation in Dom’s mouth, in a scene built almost entirely out of exposition that still moves:
“Without the HSA-fucoidan compound, both drugs might have taken hours to affect their victims,” Dom said. “The drugs, taken orally, would have to be metabolized in the digestive system before entering the bloodstream and reaching the brain. Digestion is the slowest means of drug delivery in the human body. But with the compound, the victims would have had just minutes before starting to experience the effects of the drugs.”
This part is deliberately speculative. Pharmaceutical researchers do study ways to improve drug absorption and transport substances across the blood-brain barrier. They use lipid-soluble molecules, nanoparticles, carrier systems, receptor-mediated transport, prodrugs, and other methods. But the novel’s specific combination functions as fictional technology, not as a real recipe.
That distinction is important for another reason: I would prefer not to publish a convenient instruction manual for manufacturing homicidal cappuccino.
What CRISPR Can — and Cannot — Do
Storm Damage also invokes CRISPR, inspired partly by Walter Isaacson’s The Code Breaker and the work of Jennifer Doudna and other pioneers in gene editing.
CRISPR is real and revolutionary. It enables scientists to target specific DNA sequences and remove, alter, or insert genetic material. It has transformed biological research and contributed to treatments for genetic disease. CRISPR works on genetic material in living cells; it is not a molecular food processor that directly remodels any chemical a scientist places beside it.
The characters raise CRISPR themselves as the likely lead, which is exactly the assumption this section needs to correct:
“A person who knows how to use CRISPR,” John said.
Dom nodded. “Someone with an education in biotechnology, but thousands are in our area… it would be someone with access to CRISPR. That should narrow it down.”
Dom shook his head sadly. “A guy in San Francisco makes and sells home CRISPR kits out of his garage. You could buy one, do a little home study, and try to design two-headed dogs or phosphorescent roses.”
“Or drugs like Rapture and Zombie,” Kat said.
That means a line in the novel suggesting CRISPR itself could directly modify a small drug molecule takes scientific license. CRISPR might be used to alter a microorganism, plant, or cell line so that the organism produces a different biological compound. It could modify enzymes involved in a biosynthetic pathway. But conventional medicinal chemistry, synthetic biology, protein engineering, and metabolic engineering would be more directly relevant to creating a novel psychoactive substance.
In other words, the villain would still need to be a brilliant biochemist.
He just would not be able to point CRISPR at a beaker and tell it to make the contents more evil.
What I Didn’t Have to Invent
Rapture and Zombie are fictional. The biology beneath them is not.
Drugs can hijack reward circuits. Toxic alkaloids can produce delirium, hallucinations, and violent agitation. New compounds can evade routine testing faster than labs can catalogue them. None of that required invention on my part. Pharmacology supplied the raw material.
What I added was precision — a chemist patient and amoral enough to tune those effects on purpose, instead of leaving them to chance the way jimsonweed and cocaine already do.
That’s the part that should worry you. Not that the brain can be hijacked. It already can, in a dozen documented ways. It’s that hijacking it on purpose is mostly a matter of someone deciding to try.