How Michael Crichton and James Patterson Wrote The Eruption

When Michael Crichton and his wife Sherri started dating, all they did was walk. Every weekend they were there, taking in the scenery from the California coast to the Hawaiian mountains. The island of Kauai was his favorite place, with its rivers carving through volcanic rock and steep, jagged cliffs cutting into the sky. The couple woke up before dawn to be the first to go out on the trails and together they watched the sunrise.

Those miles were sacred — and one of the few times Sherri was able to get a glimpse into Michael’s writing process. It was the early 2000s and Michael was already a literary phenomenon and a true screenwriting machine, with novels and film adaptations that grossed millions and created franchises that continue to this day. The main ones: Westworld, Twister, It is Jurassic Park. At any given time, he could be in the middle of researching multiple projects. But on those walks with Sherri, he kept circling on just one. “It was early in our relationship when he said he had a book that was set in Hawaii and was based on a volcano,” she recalls. “He was scratching his head – he was constantly working it out in his mind.”

Now, decades after its creation, this novel will arrive on June 3rd. Located on Ilha Grande, Eruption is an epic thriller about an impending volcanic eruption and a government secret with potentially fatal implications. At the center of it all is John MacGregor, or Mac, a 30-something geologist who must lead a team of researchers through increasingly dangerous territory while trying to save the lives of as many people as he can. It’s classic Crichton: a cinematic story rooted in science and full of emotion, touching on big themes like love and loss. But his journey to publication is unlike anything the author could have predicted. In 2008, just three years into their marriage, Michael died of cancer while Sherri was pregnant with their child. Although the book that would become Eruption it was the furthest thing from her mind at that moment, Sherri knew that one day she would return to it. Eventually, she would enlist the help of another prolific author, James Patterson, to do so. But it would be more than a decade before she was ready to meet him.

After Michael’s death, Sherri’s first priority was her son, John Michael. “There was no urgency to do anything immediately,” she says. “It was day after day. I had this brand new baby on my own, which was never, ever part of our plan.” But in the back of his mind, unanswered questions remained. There was so much about Michael’s professional side that she was just beginning to unravel. She wanted to know more – so she could paint a complete portrait of Michael for their son. Doing so required the heavy emotional undertaking of sifting through the voluminous archive of work he left behind.

In 2010, Sherri found the first pages of Eruption, and his world stopped. She felt the film perfectly captured Michael’s essence: his passion for nature, his dogged commitment to research, all with an undeniable narrative hook. There had to be more of this book, somewhere. Although he was meticulous in his research, Michael archived his work across multiple offices on different devices. Sherri went through boxes of paper and converted old floppy disks. Through her search, she realized that he had been researching the book long before they met, tracking different volcanoes on trips around the world. She discovered one of the many working charts from 1994 that made up the novel and then began pulling information from anywhere she could find it, looking for any mention of volcanoes.

In the meantime, Sherri, who would become CEO of the company CrichtonSun, published four of Michael’s books posthumously, some with the help of other writers, including Richard Preston, author of The hot zone. But she clung to the book about Hawaii, the one that meant so much to both of them, not wanting to do anything with it until she was sure she had all the pieces to this gigantic puzzle. She was sure he had written an ending, but all her searching never led to one. “It was the ultimate cliffhanger, the one Michael didn’t want, obviously,” she says. “I really feel like everything in him wanted to finish this book, but we lost it too soon.”

For 11 years, she held the book close to her chest. She says she wanted to preserve his legacy — and protect his enormous footprint on pop culture, which continued to grow even after her death. More than 15 years later, her work is still alive. In July, Twisted, a sequence of Twisted, starring Glen Powell and Daisy Edgar-Jones, hits theaters. There is also a new installment in your Jurassic World franchise, scheduled to launch next year. And then there’s his beloved medical drama Emergency Room, which grossed over $3.2 billion for Warner Bros. after its debut in 1994.

“All of your ideas are like your children’s,” says Sherri. “He took care of them, was very specific about how he would nurture them, going back to edit, re-edit, reorganize and fill out new and updated surveys.” This meant she could proceed Eruption only when she knew she had explored every inch of her archive. The next question was who could finish the book. She had to be a writer who could complement Michael-someone with the storytelling skills to weave this compelling narrative. In 2021, she approached her agent with the only person she had in mind: “How about bringing together two of the greatest storytellers of our time? What about James Patterson?

A collaboration machine, Patterson, whose books have sold more than 425 million copies, has worked with a former US president and the country’s queen. But unlike her books with Bill Clinton and Dolly Parton, Eruption it would be the first he would complete posthumously for another writer. The author, who has read all of Crichton’s books, devoured the available pages, which included the book’s protagonist, Mac, and the twin crises that drive the plot. He signed eagerly. “The notion of ‘another Agatha Christie’, ‘another John le Carré, another Hitchcock’”, he says. “We have another Crichton, isn’t that cool?”

While he was excited about infusing the book with his page-turning style, Patterson was also apprehensive. He published books in almost every genre, from political thrillers to romance novels, but he was not used to dealing with so much science. So he hired a researcher from the University of Alaska Anchorage to help him with the material. “Sometimes I don’t dig deep enough,” he admits. “I delved into it because that’s the nature of something that Michael Crichton’s name would be on.” Together, he and Sherri completed Eruption in less than a year, with a constant line of communication as Patterson shared her pages with Sherri for feedback.

The result is a fast-paced, deeply considered story – a story that Patterson and Sherri believe is so perfect that readers won’t be able to tell where Crichton ends and Patterson begins. They hope to reach a wide audience, which shouldn’t be difficult to achieve given the combined power of their fan bases, not to mention Hollywood’s fierce bidding war for the film rights. Variety reports which is being set up as a new franchise and A-list actors have reached out about the project. Plus, there’s at least one longtime (and very important) fan: 15-year-old John Michael, who has read all of his father’s books and loved them. Eruption, a book that played a special role in his parents’ relationship.

Every year, Sherri takes John Michael to Hawaii so they can spend time in the place her father loved. If going there brings a certain peace to them both, so does her decision to finish the job he never had the chance to do. “I don’t hesitate to think about whether I did the right thing,” she says. Knowing that the story he so wanted to tell will finally exist beyond the confines of those boxes? “It feels like freedom.”