Death Troopers Book

My almost 13-year old son read this in one day, had a nightmare that night, and then insisted that I read it as well. I admit, I was intrigued by the concept and the cover art since it came out. After reading it over the course of about 3 days, I realize the cover art and the concept remain the best things about this book.

Death Troopers came out in 2009, so I'm not going to be revealing anything major here to the hardcore Star Wars fans, but still, here's a SPOILER ALERT!!!!!!!!! If you have any intention of reading this and don't wish to know what happens, STOP NOW!!!!!!!!!!!

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OK, so, we've got an Imperial prison barge in deep space, and its engines take a shit. A Star Destroyer is in the area, but there doesn't appear to be many life forms aboard a ship that holds 10,000 souls. The prison dudes hook up to the Star Destroyer to see if they can swap meet for some spare parts, the boarding party comes back with nasty chest colds, people start dropping like flies, and only a few who have a natural immunity to the disease are left alive.

And that brings us to Han Solo and Chewbacca. Seems they're down in solitary confinement, and one of the survivors, a sexy little doctor number, gets them out. That's when all the dead dudes start to become undead (Note: no actual zombies appear until halfway through the book) and from there on out, it's one long chase sequence until the good guys make it out at the end. And no, I'm not ruining the ending for you. Of course Han and Chewie make it out. This is pre-Episode IV time, so they have bigger and better things to do later, Death Stars to help blow up and shit. They're not going to bite it on some prison barge in a zombie story. So the ending is pretty anticlimactic because you know what's coming and there really aren't any good twists.

Conceptually, Han and Chewie blasting their way through hordes of undead Storm Troopers sounds pretty awesome. But the actual application here just doesn't quite pan out. The addition of the character Trig, a whiny teenage prisoner who reminds us a little too much of a whiny teenage Anakin circa Episode II, doesn't help. But the pace moves along at a lighting fast clip, so at least we won't linger for long on these things because there's running to be done. Run, run, run. Shoot a blaster, narrowly escape a zombie attack, run, run, run. (Though one pretty effective scene is whiny teen Trig climbing a mountain of half-eaten corpses to escape a zombie, while more zombies rooting around inside said dead body mountain are reaching up between the legs and ears and kneecaps to grab him.)

The structure of this book wore on me as well. It reminded me of The DaVinci Code. Every chapter (and there are more than 40 of them in the span of 234 pages) ended in a cliffhanger, and quite frequently with a character blacking out. And also quite frequently, the very next chapter would pick back up with the same scene from the same character's POV, a needless break in the flow to artificially manufacture more tension.

The build-up of tension through the first half was pretty effective, but once the zombies kick in, the story doesn't really jump into high gear, the plot just becomes a race to the finish line. By the final act, I was flying through the pages as fast as Han and friends were running from zombies, just so I could cross the tape, have someone wrap me in that weird tinfoil blanket they throw on marathon runners, and move on to something else. But the cover art is still pretty badass. I'm gonna go look at that again.