I found “Star Wars: Red Harvest” (December 2010, hardcover) to be a disappointment both as a “Star Wars” fan and as a horror fan. Despite short chapters that should’ve made it an even breezier read than the 244-page count would suggest, I found it to be a slog.
Most of my interest in horror comes from the movies, and perhaps horror books are another animal. Still, there isn’t much sense of suspense, place or character in “Red Harvest.” It takes place during the Old Republic, on a Sith training world called Odacer-Faustin. Our nominal hero is Hestizo “Zo” Trace, a Jedi herbologist, but she’s not introduced until chapter 7. The most interesting character turns out to be a Force-sensitive plant, and that’s more because of the oddity value than because of great writing.
This book is mostly filled with selfish, unredeemable — and unfortunately, interchangeable — Sith, and that makes for a dreary read. The worst of them is the wonderfully named Darth Scabrous, a mad scientist who unleashes a zombie plague for unexplained reasons. As with his previous “Star Wars” novel, the slightly better “Death Troopers” (which at least featured Han and Chewie), author Joe Schreiber seems to make it a challenge to not use the word “zombie” too much (I noticed it once), but this is very much a zombie tale.
Rather than being scary, or at least moody, “Red Harvest” is almost comically gory. Although I never got a great sense of the layout of the Sith academy, and never really connected to any character (granted, most of the characters become “things” fairly quickly, as in “the Scabrous-thing”), I did get a good, visceral sense of the gore. It’s almost as if Schreiber breaks out the adjectives and descriptive phrases only when things are particularly gross. Some examples:
- From where she stood, she could see pigtails of small intestine poking visibly from beneath his ribs.
- The things fell upon her, the red blades slashing her to pieces as they ripped her apart. Even from where Frode stood, the crunching noises were thick and juicy and glottal, like the sound of someone biting into a particularly ripe apple.
- Neither he nor the HK noticed the bloody, gelatinous glob of infected tauntaun sputum that the snow lizard had fired at him, but it was still there, still trickling steadily down the side of his brow, making its way toward the corner of his eye.
Granted, this phraseology is what you’d expect from a Sith academy zombie novel, and it might be poetry to fans of the undead genre. But to this reader, it felt rote, because the zesty writing only came out for the gross-out scenes. I wish Schreiber put the same effort into the Sith academy setting and getting into the characters’ heads.
I enjoy almost every “Star Wars” novel I read, but I’ll be honest: You can skip this one.