spoilers-spoilers-spoilers-spoilers-spoilers-spoilers
This looks innocent enough. Right?
My Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Okay. Woah.
I finished this book in a fast-paced three days, and boy was it a ridiculous roller coaster ride. Except instead of saying "WHEEEE!" like an excited amusement-park attendee might, I was saying things more along the lines of "AHHHHHHHH!"
I was literally handed this book spur-of-the-moment by someone in one of my classes and I thought "what the heck; I'll read it because I can." After all, I'd recently watched two episodes of the Star Wars franchise (thus correcting my previous belief that the Storm Troopers were part of the Rebel resistance)--why not try to immerse myself a little more in the fandom?
Right? Right?
You know that feeling that you get when you make a decision, and then you start to go through with that decision and you start to realize that it might be one of the most emotionally scaring, terrifying, zombie-filled decisions you've made as of late?
Yeah. I know how that feels, too. And I don't think I'll be forgetting how that feels anytime within the next four months or so.
Okay. Woah.
I finished this book in a fast-paced three days, and boy was it a ridiculous roller coaster ride. Except instead of saying "WHEEEE!" like an excited amusement-park attendee might, I was saying things more along the lines of "AHHHHHHHH!"
I was literally handed this book spur-of-the-moment by someone in one of my classes and I thought "what the heck; I'll read it because I can." After all, I'd recently watched two episodes of the Star Wars franchise (thus correcting my previous belief that the Storm Troopers were part of the Rebel resistance)--why not try to immerse myself a little more in the fandom?
Right? Right?
You know that feeling that you get when you make a decision, and then you start to go through with that decision and you start to realize that it might be one of the most emotionally scaring, terrifying, zombie-filled decisions you've made as of late?
Yeah. I know how that feels, too. And I don't think I'll be forgetting how that feels anytime within the next four months or so.
So, five stars out of five.
I'd actually heard some murmurings and whisperings about this book long before I'd picked it up. But I don't think I'd heard anything that would quite prepare me for the fright-inducing gore-fest that it was. Really, if you can't handle arterial bloodspurts, decapitation, throwing up, rotting flesh, etc., this is not your kind book. In fact, this is probably the antithesis to your kind of book.
Anyway--when I'd picked up this book, I didn't know much. I knew that it was based off the Star Wars universe and I knew that somehow, at some point in the plot, there were going to be zombies. And what could be better, right? I mean, a universe that has become possibly the face of sci-fi pop culture mixed with the walking dead? It's like someone decided to take a marshmallow, slap some chocolate on the thing, and cram it between two graham crackers. Delicious.
So, armed with my bountiful knowledge, I strapped myself in and started reading.
And I soon figured out that this book was going to take its sweet time getting to the zombies.
And that as it was taking its sweet time it was going to be the scariest thing I've read in a long, long time. Joe Schrieber seriously knows how to control the pacing of his writing--I'd made it forty-five percent of the way through the text and I had yet to see any shambling and brain-eating.
But the truth is this: the shambling and brain-eating wasn't really my favorite part of the book. There were quite a few extremely powerful scenes just in the tension of the plot-buildup. One that really stuck with me, as intensely morbid and eerie as it is, is when Trig and Kale Longo are searching for an escape pod along the perimeter of the Purge (an Empire prison barge which has become very, very infected by the zombie-sick) and stumble upon a young Wookiee that's hopelessly clinging to its lifeless parents and sibling. The poor thing is crying, trying to get its family members to wrap their big shaggy arms around it in a hug, and it's stricken so hard by the horrors around it that it can't even bring itself to follow the two brothers to safety. It just stares at them, which is somehow much more creepy than the crying, and after the longest and most tightly-wound silence ever, turns back to its lifeless family members and continues to freak me the crap out while simultaneously breaking my heart. And then the chapter ends.
And I love this book for the scenes like that. Not because the cutest alien creature in the whole galaxy is whimpering over the dead bodies of its parents (the Wookiee, Schrieber? Really? The baby Wookiee?), but because this scene and every scene like it is written in such a way that I could think the infected Empire prison barge might actually have existed a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. Everything feels very real, and as each scene progresses into the next, there's this growing feeling of hysteria and hopelessness. Yet somehow, when another new terrible thing happens to the characters, it's still something of an unexpected blow. Like you don't expect someone to die, or you don't expect the poor droid to get crushed to system-failure by a bunch of newly-woken living dead.
Basically, I really liked it.
But there were some things about the book that seemed weird. I don't know if it was my lack of exposure to the Star Wars universe (I've only seen two of the movies all the way through), but the appearance of Han Solo and Chewbacca seemed out of place. For like ten pages. And then there were zombies and I was so caught up in the scary and the disturbing that I honestly couldn't feel like the cameo was forced. Plus I really like Han and Chewie; they're like the best.
Also, the end is extremely abrupt. This is something I'm starting to notice in a lot of books, and in some of them it's much more noticeable than others, but with high-momentum novels especially, the velocity and the inertia of the story almost sends me flying out of my seat when it finally comes to a screeching halt. Luckily for all passengers, Death Troopers has a bit of padding with one final scene that I think actually wraps the story up very nicely, and so I can forget the whiplash it gave me from out sudden halt.
Also, the end is extremely abrupt. This is something I'm starting to notice in a lot of books, and in some of them it's much more noticeable than others, but with high-momentum novels especially, the velocity and the inertia of the story almost sends me flying out of my seat when it finally comes to a screeching halt. Luckily for all passengers, Death Troopers has a bit of padding with one final scene that I think actually wraps the story up very nicely, and so I can forget the whiplash it gave me from out sudden halt.
You should go read this book
...but only if you really can handle the heavy gore. I'm talking The Hot Zone-level morbidity and gag-reflex-activating bloodshed that will make the light-stomached taste the bile in the back of their throats. This was heavy stuff, and I'm not exaggerating.
ALSO...
It occurred to me when I was about halfway done reading this book that I had seen some Death Troopers-related things milling about. At the ComiCon.
I should not have been standing so close.
I took this picture back when I thought the Storm Troopers were good guys. "Look at the poor guy! He got in a fight!" I said. I think I'll last all of three seconds when the zombie apocalypse comes along if I don't find a Rambo or a MacGyver to protect me.
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