David's Review of Death Troopers

3/5 Rancors - Let me just say right off the top that I am not normally a fan of horror books. I realize that the genre is popular now, but zombies and the undead hold no particular appeal for me. However, Death Troopers is a Star Wars book, so I decided to give it a try. I was not familiar with Joe Schreiber as this is the first of his books I have read.

The basic plot of Death Troopers is fairly straightforward. The Imperial prison barge Purge is packed with 500 prisoners being transported to an isolated penal colony. In the first stages of the book we have the normal kind of prison story with prisoners fighting prisoners, guards exercising their power, a warden of questionable character, etc. We are introduced to most of the main characters. Then everything changes. The barge's thrusters fail and the barge comes to a halt in the vicinity of what appears to be a deserted Star Destroyer. A boarding party is sent on to the Star Destroyer to see if any engine parts can be found. The Star Destroyer is dark and spooky, and things quickly go amiss. Only part of the boarding party makes it alive back to the Purge, and they unknowingly bring a horrible disease back with them that quickly attacks the barge's population. Death comes for almost all. Then the dead begin to rise and come after the six survivors, including two surprise characters not listed in the Dramatis Personae in the front of the book.

The primary characters are just superficially developed in the book. We only get to know a little bit about them. The book is almost nonstop action, but it never seemed to be particularly scary. Gross in places, yes. Lots of blood and gore. Lots of shambling undead and lots of disgusting scenes, but not really terrifying. One of the contributing factors to this is that the two surprise characters are icons in Star Wars lore, and you know that they are not going to die.

Mr. Schreiber's writing is acceptable. The story moves along quickly through short chapters, and I did find that I wanted to see what happened next at the end of each chapter. I suspect that the book is doing well enough so that more tales of this Star Wars genre will be published. They are just never going to be my favorites.

One last aside - I would like to have seen how Darth Vader or a Master Jedi would have dealt with the situation on the barge and the Star Destroyer. That could be interesting.