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61 of 72 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Released just in time for Halloween 2009, this is the first R-rated Star Wars horror story. A dad's review., November 4, 2009
I've read a fair share of Star Wars books, but never anything this gory or downright scary. Star Wars is usually pretty tame. So I was surprised to find this book whose cover is comprised of a bloody Stormtrooper head hanging from a chain with a hook jammed through its eye. I like old-school Star Wars, from the Classic Era, Episodes IV-VI, so I was eager to read this to see what the "Death Troopers" were all about. Well, that decapitated Stormtrooper head scene is actually in the book, along with many others that could probably not be proudly displayed at your local bookstore. I'm actually surprised that this book doesn't contain a warning label or sticker that this book is for "Suggested for Mature Readers". But here it is, for the first time, a Star Wars book about flesh-eating zombies in deep space. Parents, the Clone Wars this book is not. Here are some sample lines:
"[The zombie's] mouth was buried in Pauling's throat and it was busily slurping its blood, ripping off huge gobbets of his flesh... Strands of Pauling's flesh were dangling from its teeth."
"The leg was connected to a torso, covered up by another, and another, the pile growing in front of him comprising what he realized was hundreds of dismembered corpses--heads, arms, legs, and whole bodies, bare bones, many of them still dressed in rotten Imperial uniforms... hacked recklessly to pieces, still others partially devoured, whole gobbets of of flesh gnawed off. Many of the parts were bloated to the point where the skin itself had begun to split open like sausages..."
Well, that's probably enough for you to get the idea. There's an exciting, gritty story here with a couple of fun cameos from classic Star Wars characters, but to get through it your imagination will have to cope with all kinds of horrific imagery and gristly situations where people eat each other alive and poke weapons into eye sockets and shove cleavers into heads. There are also some heart-racing chases in the dark for those who dig that kind of thing. So if you like that stuff, you'll enjoy this. I can't say I ENJOYED that part of it, but I was able to stomach the content and I particularly enjoyed the fact that it takes place within 5 years of Star Wars: Episode IV. However, I can't imagine letting my little boy crack this book open and I hope other parents won't blindly buy this book for their kids just because "it's Star Wars". If you wouldn't let your kids read a book based on Night Of The Living Dead, steer them clear of Death Troopers too.
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20 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Creepy Fun in the Star Wars Universe, October 14, 2009
I became aware of this book through the video trailers fans had done for it. I am a huge zombie genre fan and a Star wars junkie. This was just too good to be true. If you enjoy Star Wars, Horror, or Zombie fiction you will enjoy this book. The pacing is fast and addictive. The characters are realistic and approachable.
If there is anything to complain about this book is that it is fast paced. For the first time I sat down and read a book from cover to cover in one sitting. I haven't owned the book for 24 hours and have finished the book. Part of me is curious to see if there will be another book following the characters that survive the events in the book or if the infection will become a series of books. That the concepts from the book are being brought into the Galaxies MMO and the fan adoption of the ideas makes me hopeful that this is not the last we will see of this type of book in the Star Wars Universe.
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12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Not My Cup of Grue, January 7, 2010
I'm more of a Star Wars fan than a zombie fan, but I was willing to give "Death Troopers" a chance. After all, the Star Wars Expanded Universe is very flexible, capable of telling stories in all manner of genres, so why not horror?
I found "Death Troopers" to be a grim, dirty, depressing story. The violence and gore didn't bother me so much as the tone of the book -- it just didn't seem like Star Wars to me, it could have been any generic sci-fi / horror franchise. I found the whole experience to be depressing, cold and inevitable. At a certain point, the story slipped into the modern zombie movie mode, and from there on in it was all about going through the motions.
Minor spoiler alert: I agree with some reviewers that the addition of Han Solo and Chewbacca weakens the story. It was fairly easy to pick out the story arcs for the other characters, but once the author introduced Han and Chewie (my favorite SW characters, by the way), I started caring less about the other characters and more about how this adventure would fit into Han and Chewie's chronology.
I guess I'm more interested in happier endings. To me, Star Wars is about the battle of good versus evil, and "Death Troopers" was sort of a monster-of-the-week experience for me. It didn't fit my expectation of what a Star Wars novel should be, and it didn't thrill or entertain me like I had hoped.
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