If you’re in the right mood, movies about some guy mowing down a bunch of reanimated corpses — Peter Jackson’s “Dead Alive” comes to mind — can be quite amusing and entertaining. But in book form, the same storyline can wear a little thin.
I was really digging Joe Schreiber’s “Death Troopers” (2009) until about the halfway point. The first half plays kind of like “Alien” placed in the “Star Wars” galaxy. An Imperial prison barge stumbles across a derelict Star Destroyer. This ship should have a crew of 8,000 healthy human beings on it; instead, it appears to be empty.
The buildup works well, as our heroic (and attractive, natch) Imperial doctor Zahara Cody tends to her patients. We also get a sympathetic duo of imprisoned brothers whose dad has just died. And an evil Imperial commander.
And on page 95, there’s a really great surprise appearance by two old favorites. I didn’t see it coming, and it was a welcome addition. And Schreiber gets the personalities of these two old favorites right, showing that although he’s mostly a horror writer, he’s not completely out of his depth as a “Star Wars” writer.
But mostly, “Death Troopers” isn’t a character book. Ultimately, it’s not a medical mystery, either: The “Andromeda Strain”-style intrigue that spices up the early pages soon gets sent to the back burner.
After the 100th page, it’s not even an “Alien”-type horror yarn anymore, which is too bad because the vast “Star Wars” galaxy lends itself to that type of horror.
Indeed, “Star Wars” literature has a surprisingly decent track record with the horror genre. For example, there’s an intense sequence in Kevin Anderson’s “Darksaber” where Luke encounters the one-armed wampa on a visit to Hoth. More recently, Christie Golden had a nice monsters-on-the-loose passage in “Fate of the Jedi: Omen.” And the comics have delved into the genre; “Jedi Academy: Leviathan” comes to mind.
The second half of “Death Troopers” is just zombies, and more zombies (even though the word “zombies” isn’t mentioned until page 230). The monotony is only broken by one entertaining sequence where the evil Imperial commander learns the horrific way in which the handful of remaining Star Destroyer personnel managed to stay alive. But mostly, it’s zombie chases and zombie kills.
Some readers might be in the mood for that. Personally, I hoped for a bit more.