Review: Red Harvest by Joe Schreiber

 

This is the prequel to Death Troopers in which the origin of the zombie virus is explained. It starts on a Sith planet where Sith students train at the academy run by Dark Scabrous. Scabrous is determined to find the key to immortality which as you can guess leads to a zombie outbreak. It's not like they're on a nice planet either, it's freezing cold and so hostile that the ancient Sith academy is crumbling into ruins. Definitely not the place you want to be for a zombie outbreak. 

The key to the zombie juice is a special flower that has to be tied to a Jedi. This is what brings Hestizo and her bonded flower to the ice planet. A bounty hunter named Tulkh, who's a Whiphid (you should Google that), takes her from the special Jedi gardens to Dark Scabrous. (Y'all for whatever reason I thought Hesitzo and Tulkh were going to be a thing, but look up a picture of a Whiphid, I don't think they're compatible with humans.) Anyways they get to the academy where Scabrous is experimenting on the students he thinks are doing the worst. On a planet far off in the galaxy, Hestizo's brother, Rojo, senses that something has happened to her and he goes on a mission to find her. He's a Jedi knight. 

All the Sith students start to get sick with this zombie disease and run around to eat each other. What makes the disease worse is that Sith don't help each other at all. They believe in every person for themselves which is probably the worst motto when there's a bunch of zombies running around. Spoiler: one person can't take on hundreds of enemies. Chaos ensues and the reader follows the perspectives of multiple different characters. 

Overall this was a fun read. I did get the Kindle version so only half of the book was actually the book and the rest was just previews of other books which I found to be weird and annoying. I feel like if I'm reading a book, most of it should actually be the book I bought. Anyways, given the fact that this is a zombie book the content warnings mostly have to do with bodily harm and cannibalism. As always, I recommend looking at StoryGraph for a full list of possible content warnings (this one is author approved which is the first time I've seen that on the site). 

Happy reading and stay warm/cool!