Star Wars Legends Reading Challenge: Red Harvest

Hello friends, the Legends Reading Challenge continues with book #4, Red Harvest, by Joe Scheiber.

(Warning: SPOILERS!!!)

So, this one is that rare combination of Star Wars and horror, specifically: zombies! Not my usual cup of tea, although I will admit to having watched the first few seasons of The Walking Dead, as well as The Last of Us (which I loved). So zombies aren’t completely off the table for me, lol.

This one takes place about 3,600 BBY (before the Battle of Yavin), so still firmly in the Old Republic. The majority of the story takes place on the icy planet Odacer-Faustin, where a Sith Academy is overseen by Darth Scabrous (that’s a good one!). Scabrous has been experimenting with an ancient Sith ritual in order to achieve immortality (as they do). But he is lacking one crucial element: a particular flower called the Murakami orchid, which is slightly Force-sensitive.

On the planet Marfa, a Jedi named Hestizo Trace, who is a member of the Jedi Agricultural Corps, tends the many plant species there, including a Murakami orchid with which she has a special relationship. Hestizo, or Zo, can communicate with the orchid through the Force, and can hear its thoughts in her head, which I find particularly fascinating.

Somehow Scabrous is aware of this orchid and Zo’s relationship with it (it’s not clear how he knows; Sith magic?) and sends a bounty hunter after her, a Whiphid named Tulkh. He takes her and the orchid back to the Sith Academy. Scabrous puts the orchid into his crazy potion and injects it into his speciment, a Sith student he’s been experimenting on. The student, Wim Nickter, has been transformed into a mindless beast. He escapes his cage, slams into another student who had been spying on Scabrous, and they both plummet from the top of the tower to the ground hundreds of meters below. They don’t die, however; Nickter had infected the other student, and they both run rampant through the campus, infecting the other students, and the the “Sickness” spreads. Zo, meanwhile, escapes Scabrous in the confusion and realizes she can still hear the orchid–through the infected students.

In another part of the galaxy, Rojo Trace, Zo’s brother, is investigating a crash (he has psychometry, where he can see images when he touches an object). During the investigation, he “hears” Zo calling for help, and is determined to find her. It doesn’t take long for him to figure it out, and off he goes to Odacer-Faustin to save his sister.

Along the way, we get to know a few Sith students–Ra’at, Kindra, Maggs, and Hegwith–and how they are dealing with the hordes of zombie students swarming the campus. They band together, but because they’re Sith, they don’t trust each other and will betray each other the first chance they get. One by one, they’re taken out by the zombies in bloody, brutal fashion.

Meanwhile, Scabrous, who is also infected by his potion, needs to find Zo: the Sith ritual requires him to eat the living heart of someone with a high midichlorian count so he doesn’t become a mindless zombie, only acquiring the immortality he seeks. He finally captures her and is about to cut her heart out when her brother shows up and fights Scabrous. Unfortunately, he doesn’t win the duel, and Scabrous disembowels him. It’s finally the spirit of the orchid that saves her, as Zo commands it to grow inside the zombie bodies, exploding them with vines growing out of ears, eyes, mouth, until their heads expode, lol.

Zo’s last savior is Tulkh, who has had his own adventures with the zombies, allying with an HK-droid and a mechanic named Pergus Frode. They show up on Tulkh’s ship to lift her out of the Sith chamber where more zombies are trying to kill her. They manage to blow up the tower and get away from the planet, but Tulkh has been infected by the blood of a zombie tauntaun (really) and Zo has to blast him out of the airlock, along with a stowaway Sith student zombie. When she returns to Marfa, she decides to go back to the Temple on Coruscant to continue her training, in case it’s not the end of the zombie virus story.

So, yeah, this book moved right along with short chapters, tight writing, and a whole lot of horrifyingly detailed blood and gore, as one would expect with a zombie novel. By the end, I’d had about enough of disintigrating body parts, exposed viscera, mindless flesh-eating, etc. What I did find interesting, as I mentioned, was the bond between Zo and the orchid, and the idea of a Force-sensitive plant, which I don’t think we normally consider. They are living things, of course, and so are imbued with the Force like everything else. That this one was semi-sentient was really intriguing (although we did see it in the Drengir in the High Republic). I also like the Neti librarian, who was a huge tree-like creature that oversaw the Sith archives of scrolls, parchments, and data discs. He reminds me of an Ent, like Treebeard from the Lord of the Rings. Unfortunately, he got infected, too, and decided to burn everything in the library. He was really the only good thing at the Sith Academy, and the fact that he was a plant-like being speaks volumes. The cold, dark deadness of the Sith Academy contrasts sharply with the living laboratory of the plant-filled Jedi Agricultural outpost. The fact that the orchid, which was a key ingredient in the Sith immortality potion, which only brought living death, was also the key to defeating it, was a nice symbolic touch.

I also want to mention the Jedi Agricultural Corps, of which Zo was a member. In Legends, any Jedi who don’t or can’t take the Jedi trials or who otherwise aren’t up to snuff on their Force abilities and can’t become a Knight, go to one of several branches like the Agricultural Corps. They don’t get kicked out of the Order, they just become useful in some other way. Zo had her talent of communicating with plant life, so that’s where she went. Everyone has their place and a purpose.

In contrast, it was also interesting to see the workings of a Sith Academy. The students, naturally, are competitive in a self-serving and often devious way; it’s survival of the the most cunning and ruthless. They certainly don’t work together or form friendships, even under the stress of a zombie attack, lol. Dark side through and through, so it wasn’t sad to see that all of them perished.

I found out that this book is a prequel of sorts to Schrieber’s other zombie Star Wars book, Death Troopers, which occurs much later in the timeline. More zombie fun! This book was entertaining in its own way, but not my favorite kind of book, especially when it comes to Star Wars; however, Halloween is on the horizon, so my rating is…

Three out of five lightsabers.

Next up is The Old Republic: Fatal Alliance, by Sean Williams.