Reviews Books The JC Lit Reviews Special: RED HARVEST (Spoilers)

Sure, I mentioned how it could have been better as well as the parts I didn't like. That's why it didn't get a perfect score, and I felt like people would like to see the reasons I knocked points off. But I really enjoyed the book, and it's one that I'll reread for sure (probably even soon). The good definitely outweighed the bad and I really liked the feel of the novel. I feel like a 7.5 is a really deserving score.

 

Wow. Ok. Your opinion. I won't bash it. But I have a hard time giving something like this crap anywhere near the top 25% of [SW] books. Perhaps I'm a bit more critical; perhaps I don't do the +5 starting point because it has Star Wars on title like some. I've only read the first 8 chapters (free) and a few pages at the store and I've read his previous DT... but I just can't stomach his prose or his nauseating feeble tries at the SW universe. The repitition, the un-horror, the constant in-your-face-here's-your-Earth-in-SW references, (Ostrogoth? Seriously?! A complete PLAGIARIZED LINE from Taken. How does that even get published? Its pure plagiarization; yet it still gets PUBLISHED!? That seriously alone, is worth -3 points, just for the fact that he is so willing to flat-out STEAL a whole line, and the most promiment and hyped up line from Taken too [it was all over the net, on all the trailers, etc.], who greenlights that? who oks that?)

From the 8 chapters and bits I read; I just can't see even what good there is. No characterization, "suspenseful" everyone can die = everyone does die, usually pages after their debut so its all meaningless and really isn't suspenseful because you don't care enough about the characters to be suspended/anxiety over the fact that they might *gasp* die coming up soon so when they do predictably die in 5 pages you can just *shrug* and move on, poor plot, poor story elements, lame ideas (what hasn't SW had yet? Oh, a force plant, so lets do that.), obvious lack of EU knowledge (knowledge of movies, sure, but knowledge of EU, no. "Hey Leeland, hey Pablo, can I do X? or is there anything like Y?" seems to be the basis for his knowledge of the EU), and "well, it'll sell, its SW and Zombies, whats not to like", and predictably due to that it sells and gets the high reviews because of the fandom omigoshing over "OMG NERDGASM, ZOMBIES IN SW!". Ridiculous through and through.

Sorry for my rant. But it just irks me to see obviously horrible novels get high reviews on here just due to the fact it has SW on the title. And didn't mean this to be a bashing on you monopoly. Sorry.

 

I don't agree with your math, because there's not an even distribution of scores. In most classrooms, grades are not handed out such that the worst students gets an F, the best gets an A, and there's an even distribution in between; rather, there's usually some framework on which to hang a grade; an F is not a 0 but a 50 (or so), an A doesn't mean someone's the best in the class, but that someone has satisfied the requirements of the class as best as possible. Similarly in book ratings: You'll notice that 0s and 1s are very rarely given, because books that awful generally don't get published. Plus there's self selection going on: most people get pretty good at selecting books they know they'll like, and may well find most of the books they read, even the worst of the books they read, pretty well to their taste. So you won't have a range of 0-100, you'll have a range of, say, 70-90 or so, depending on the reader's standards, with a few excellent outliers and a few dismal outliers. So a 75% rating doesn't mean in the top 25% of novels, because the vast majority of novels read by any person will probably fall in the 70-95% range, meaning a score of 75% may actually be a very low percentile in terms of the distribution of ratings; 75% means the book gets a C: mediocre but not awful.

EDIT: Actually, if I had time, I'd be very curious to take a look at what the distribution of ratings looks like across these Lit Review threads.

 

I strongly disliked Death Troopers but I was willing to give Schreiber a second chance. I wish I hadn't.

After reading Red Harvest, I definitely dislike the authors's style of writing. Litanies of zombie gore and splatterfests are not my thing. Some people don't like Lord of the Rings because of Tolkein's style. That's an acceptable rationale for disliking a particular book but even a book with idiosyncratic styling that rubs someone the wrong way can still be evaluated on pacing, character development, plot, etc. It is in these topics that Red Harvest is a miserable failure.

I cite only the most glaring example I can remember. The librarian is a Neti, a tree species permanently rooted to the library. The reader has just experienced several chapters where Hestizo and Scabrous have interacted with the rooted tree where his roots were described repeatedly. The rooted tree sets himself on fire. He dies. Later, the mechanic sees the tree with the other Sith acolytes attacking the ship. How is that possible? First he's dead. Second, he doesn't move. Who is editing this thing?

My second major complaint is how Red Harvest does not "feel" like Star Wars. I'm not talking about the sentient flower or zombies. The GFFA is flexible enough to include these things. I'm talking about the sense (which is also true for Death Troopers) that both plots were conceived in some other universe and the SW label was slapped on. Look at the names: Jura Ostrogoth, Hartwig, Maggs, Rusk Lance (sounds like a British boarding school). Second Rojo Trace is completely extrinsic to the plot. He does nothing to alter the course of the story and his death has no impact on the eventual resolution. It feels as if he was added simply because the auhor need somebody who actually was indicative of the GFFA.

Essentialy this is the worst SW book I have ever read so my score is .5/10.

 

The way I understood it, the librarian was "rooted" all throughout the library, but that he was mobile along his root system -- as a shapeshifter, he would shift his humanoid face to wherever a person he was talking to in the library was. After all the destruction, I thought he'd torn away from his immobile roots.

 

PadmeA_Panties, I had some time, so I did the math. (It's possible I did it wrong; I'm not really a maths person.) The average score across Lit Review Special is 7.65 with a standard deviation of 1.01, which means that 68% of all scores are between 6.64 and 8.66, and 95% of the scores are between 5.63 and 9.67. The lowest score is 5.28 (501st) and the highest 9.52 (Revenge of the Sith). As far as percentiles:

50th percentile = 7.8 (Tempest, Exile)
75th percentile = 8.4 (Betrayal, Inferno)
90th percentile = 8.97 (Dark Rendezvous, Outbound Flight)
95th percentile = 9.18 (Rebel Dream)

By these standards the only two books two get an A+ (97-100 percentile) are Hard Contact and Revenge of the Sith.

Of course, with only 65 reviews covering 8 or 9 years now (I didn't calculate Red Harvest or Knight Errant in these numbers since they're so new), those values will change slightly with each new book reviewed. Maybe I'll do a post sometime next week tracking some numbers within individual series, over time, by author, etc.

 

We've actually got a thread for this kind of data here. I'd suggest taking this there.

 

Huh. Didn't realize that existed. I'll take a look through there and see if there are any numbers I'm interested in that aren't already covered there!

 

A reasonable presumption but I raise two points.

First, why have the long climatic scene with the tree on fire crashing down around Rojo Trace creating actually good dramatic tension, why show the virus attack all types of living tissue illustrating it's infectivity only to obliterate both plot points to have a mechanic who has never seen the Neti say "what's that burnt tree thing?" He is fearful already by the horde of zombies in his landing bay. He has no reference to be more or less afraid of the Neti.

Second, we as readers shouldn't have to create explanations. The author should present those to us using either narration or context. I don't believe there was enough of either for these events to make coherent sense. Perhaps there are more clues that I missed that you picked up on. If you could let me know what they are, I'd appreciate it.

 

Take the discussion to the discussion thread, please.

 

I would give it a 5.5/10. I just found no real substance, which is a shame since I did like the premise.

 

Star Wars=WIN
Zombies=WIN

10/10 from me. I loved it!!!

 

This is exactly why Havoc's ratings are always off.

 

You gotta be kidding?

The book was horrible, I mean, just getting free chapters every week should have been a clue that things ain't right. Forget the talking flower, the bottom line my concern now is that some people will just try and expolit the era and put any kind of story together and slap it in the old republic era. This is not the clone wars animated series trampling over the EU either, this was just a bad book.

0.25/10 By the way, I returned it and got the new Halo: Forerunner book, now that was good.

 

Average score: 84.2/15 = 5.61

 

Finished this novel a couple days ago. I liked it. It was fast paced and went for the jugular. I liked Deathtroopers a little better because it had more sympathetic characters, however, Red Harvest with an all original cast offered up more suspense because anyone could be on the chopping block.

I wish more had been done with Darth Scabrous to make him stand out a little more visually. Make him an alien or something. The generic white guy Sith Lord thing was a bit of a let down. I also didn't see the need to include Darth Drear's backstory, though interesting in this novel. Scarbrous could've come up with this all by himself. I was hoping their would be a Darth Andeddu reference, but oh well.

I liked the Traces, but I do wish a little more had been done with them. Especially Rojo when he reached the Sith planet. I wanted to see him kick more ass. Don't bring up Taken and not have him bring the pain. I did think the Taken reference went a bit too far.

I also didn't get the connection between Hestizo and the plant or how they just conveniently found another plant at the end. I was fine with the idea of the virus being a creation of Palpatine's Empire. Though I give the author some credit for drastically changing the setting and adding the weight of history to his tale. As it stands, he's got a swath of potential history to bring back the virus if need be. One of my biggest issues with Red Harvest was that it seemed like Hestizo completely forgot she was a Jedi, except for like once or twice throughout the whole book. She just kept getting manhandled and drug along by Tulkh. Didn't care for that.

The brightest spots for me was hard hitting writing style. I thought Scabrous was well enough rendered, particularly the zombie Scabrous, I thought Tulkh was pretty badass, and I liked how the Sith students acted like Sith. I thought the zombies were more powerful than the ones in Death Troopers, but I'm chalking that up to be Sith zombies. For a moment I was hoping Zo, HK, Tulkh, and Frode would all survive so they could go zombie hunting together in a future book. I think that could've been cool, but oh well.

I'm giving this one 7/10.

 

Average score: 91.2/16 = 5.70

 

This novel was... well, let's say it just was. It is definitely a book printed on a paper, but beyond that it doesn't feel like any kind of fiction I'm used to.

There really was no plot. It was just characters running from Zombies, most of the time unsuccessfully. Said characters were also not only mostly blank, they were mostly uninteresting and unsympathizing too. Seriously, I am supposed to root for a bunch of Sith Students, who are supposed Evil Beyond Redemption by default? The novel also sets up various backstab-eager interactions between them, which turn to be completely irrelevant, as all get infected within just a few chapters of introduction. The female AgriCorps Jedi is the only character worth rooting for and there was little doubt that she would leave, while mostly everyone else, including her kidnapper, would die. For that matter, neither she not anyone else gets any character development at all - they're just running away from Zombies. The cheesiness and ultimate stupidity of the Darth Bigbad didn't help either. Talking Force-sensitive plant I actually had no problem with, but an HK-droid who drops with "Statement" speech after his restraining bolt is removed? Why screw with their most characteristic trait, that makes them so awesome?

Even though I didn't really like Deathtroopers either - it was more interesting. Due to having several sympathetic characters, actual development of some of them and a good build of suspense at the starts, it felt like an exciting read at least, despite all necessary gore. Here, even the scary and gory parts were not.

3.5/10 I'm still debating over whether Crystal Star is worse than this or not.

 

Average score: 94.7/17 = 5.57

 

Here is my review.


1.1/10

 

Average score: 95.8/18 = 5.32

 

I enjoyed this one--and a lot better than Death Troopers, which I rated as a solid meh (looking back at my score for that one, I'm surprised I gave it an 8).

Based of DT, whic I was looking forward to, I wasn't expecting much from Red harvest. But I found the story much better, more creative, and a much tighter story.

More scary too. A good deal more, IMO. I even felt afraid for unlikable Sith attacked by the Sith zombies. How scary is a monster that scares beings as horrific as the Sith? How much of a monster do you have to be?

I do think a more appropriate, pulp fictiony title would have been Teenage Sith Zombies! That line was mentioned somewhere in the book, and I loved that Schreiber went there.

The descriptions were so much more crisp and vivid too...artistic even--albeit graphic (and why wouldn't they be?).

Just well done.

8.5/10

 

Average score: 104.3/19 = 5.49

 

This was a fun read.

8.5 for me as well.

I thought Schreiber nailed the feeling of one aspect dead-on. Not since original game have we seen as accurate a representation of KOTOR/TOR era Sith academies. The collection of petty gimps, poncing bullies, and primadonnas, who would act with all manner of petty idiocy such as starving prospective Sith-wannabes into waiting outside the entrance for days, or harass new arrivals to the local spaceport was great to see. Dreshdae spaceport and the Korriban academy -- well, at least MY Dreshdae and Korriban -- are quite literally littered with the bodies of exactly these types of ignoramouses.

And when Sith academies galaxy-wide are opened up in TOR to real-world griefers the world over, I can only imagine that the antics of Sharadan or Mekel, and those see in Red Harvest, are going to be a cakewalk. We'll be wishing for the level of pettiness or stupidity shown by the students at Odacer-Faustin 90210 over what fifteen year old, Darthr0><><0r, is going make your Lvl 1 Inquisitor do for a shiny colored belt.

So, I think the (de)evolution in the stock of Sith students -- as characterized by Red Harvet -- from KOTOR circa-3.9KBBY to TOR 3.6KBBY is very reasonable.

 

Average score: 112.8/20 = 5.64