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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
Set before the events of Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace, this new novel is a thrilling follow-up to Star Wars: Darth Plagueis.
It's kill or be killed in the space penitentiary that houses the galaxy’s worst criminals, where convicts face off in gladiatorial combat while an underworld gambling empire reaps the profits of the illicit blood sport. But the newest contender in this savage arena, as demonic to behold as he is deadly to challenge, is fighting for more than just survival. His do-or-die mission, for the dark masters he serves, is to capture the ultimate weapon: an object that will enable the Sith to conquer the galaxy.
Sith lords Darth Plagueis and Darth Sidious are determined to possess the prize. And one of the power-hungry duo has his own treacherous plans for it. But first, their fearsome apprentice must take on a bloodthirsty prison warden, a cannibal gang, cutthroat crime lord Jabba the Hutt, and an unspeakable alien horror. No one else could brave such a gauntlet of death and live. But no one else is the dreaded dark-side disciple known as Darth Maul.
Praise for Lockdown
“Schreiber . . . was a great choice for this novel, imbuing the story with a dark, foreboding tone while never quite stepping into the horror territories that Death Troopers and Red Harvest took us.”—Jedi News
“Fans of the dark side should rejoice. Lockdown delivers a can’t-put-this-down tale of scum and villainy.”—Club Jade
“[Lockdown is] an action-packed ride that spins one entertaining chapter after another. The multiple layers of story keeps readers guessing what will happen next and just who will live and who will die. . . . It certainly adds to the character of Darth Maul while matching [Darth] Plagueis’s complexity with sheer fun. . . . Five out of five metal bikinis.”—Roqoo Depot
“Somehow, Schreiber is able to skate the line between hard-hitting prison story and the adventure and excitement I love from Star Wars in a way that doesn’t betray either genre. It’s really quite masterful.”—Big Shiny Robot
“Lockdown is an exciting, engaging read. . . . It actually lines up beautifully for a sequel, which I, for one, would love to read.”—Coffee with Kenobi
“The novel makes The Clone Wars better. It also illuminates The Phantom Menace. I think it’s the hallmark of the best tie-in fiction to resonate throughout other parts of the expanded universe in that way.”—Knights’ Archive
“By the fiftieth page, I was hooked. . . . Lockdown is a wonderful ‘antihero’ novel, where it’s just fine to root for the villain, because there are even worse things out there. This book was so fun and entertaining. I’ll have to keep an eye out for more Star Wars books from Schreiber.”—Seattle Geekly
- Sales Rank: #464153 in Books
- Published on: 2014-01-28
- Released on: 2014-01-28
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.53" h x 1.29" w x 6.29" l, 1.25 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 368 pages
Review
“Schreiber . . . was a great choice for this novel, imbuing the story with a dark, foreboding tone while never quite stepping into the horror territories that Death Troopers and Red Harvest took us.”—Jedi News
“Fans of the dark side should rejoice. Lockdown delivers a can’t-put-this-down tale of scum and villainy.”—Club Jade
“[Lockdown is] an action-packed ride that spins one entertaining chapter after another. The multiple layers of story keeps readers guessing what will happen next and just who will live and who will die. . . . It certainly adds to the character of Darth Maul while matching [Darth] Plagueis’s complexity with sheer fun. . . . Five out of five metal bikinis.”—Roqoo Depot
“Somehow, Schreiber is able to skate the line between hard-hitting prison story and the adventure and excitement I love from Star Wars in a way that doesn’t betray either genre. It’s really quite masterful.”—Big Shiny Robot
“Lockdown is an exciting, engaging read. . . . It actually lines up beautifully for a sequel, which I, for one, would love to read.”—Coffee with Kenobi
“The novel makes The Clone Wars better. It also illuminates The Phantom Menace. I think it’s the hallmark of the best tie-in fiction to resonate throughout other parts of the expanded universe in that way.”—Knights’ Archive
“By the fiftieth page, I was hooked. . . . Lockdown is a wonderful ‘antihero’ novel, where it’s just fine to root for the villain, because there are even worse things out there. This book was so fun and entertaining. I’ll have to keep an eye out for more Star Wars books from Schreiber.”—Seattle Geekly
About the Author
Joe Schreiber is the author of several novels, including Star Wars: Red Harvest, Star Wars: Death Troopers, Chasing the Dead, and Au Revoir, Crazy European Chick. He was born in Michigan but spent his formative years in Alaska, Wyoming, and Northern California. He lives in central Pennsylvania with his wife and two children.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1
Cog Hive Seven
Wham!
The first punch came at Maul sideways, spinning his upper body around with the sheer force of the impact and driving him back a half step before he fully recovered his equilibrium. Somewhere under his feet, the alloy plates of the cell’s floor seemed to shiver and quake, threatening to give way.
He spat out a tooth and wiped away the blood.
The creature in front of him was a walking trophy case of previous kills. Two and a half meters high, its massive shoulders and upper torso encased in jagged plates of primitive armor that clearly had once served as the jawbone and carapace of a much larger predator, it seemed to occupy an entire corner of the prison cell.
Maul stared at the thing. The gray slope of its face was a surgeon’s nightmare of ritualistic scars, metal rings and studs, wire loops, and hooks, with bluish sacks pulsating beneath its eyes, all of it siphoning down and inward toward a gaping, razor-toothed mouth. Even its arms seemed to have been plucked from two different organisms. The right hand was a blunt-knuckled fist, the left an elongated spider-fingered claw. Together they formed a mallet and blade, one made for pounding, the other for slashing. It was the right that had come careening out of nowhere just seconds before, slamming Maul backward and knocking out one of his teeth.
The thing reached down and picked up Maul’s incisor from the floor of the cell. Straightening up, it shoved the tooth into an empty space in its own mouth, twisting it until it lodged in place. Then it grinned at Maul as if asking how he liked the sight of one of his teeth in its mouth—another trophy for its collection.
Maul gazed back at it.
And then the rage came.
And the rage was good.
The uniform they’d given him was a standard orange jumpsuit whose heavy fabric cut off movement in most directions. Maul heard its seams ripping as he sprang at his opponent, closing the half-meter gap between them in less than a second. The thing responded exactly as he’d hoped, lunging up eagerly to meet his advance. Its mismatched arms pinwheeled wildly before it, swinging and clawing through the stale gray air of the cell, its voice screeching at him in a guttural, choking language he’d never heard before.
Let those be your dying words, Maul thought. Right here. Today.
Close enough now that he could smell the corpse-stink pouring off it like rotten meat, he fell into a reflexive series of moves. Both hands shot out and grabbed the creature by its throat, hoisting it up over his head and squeezing until he felt the deep tendons of its neck beginning to give and weaken in his grip. There was a wet, muffled click from somewhere inside the thing’s chest and a sudden glut of warm, thick, sticky fluid began spurting up from its throat.
Blood.
Jet black.
The sight of it gave Maul no satisfaction, only the vaguely annoying realization that it never should have taken him this long to turn the battle to his advantage. Still, ending his opponent’s life quickly would restore a certain necessary balance to the encounter—if not honor, at least vindication. He tightened his grip, and the screaming sound got louder, becoming a broken, birdlike squawk. More blood leapt up, inky black and viscous, and started pouring from its mouth and eye sockets.
Enough.
Executing a perfectly balanced spin, Maul swung the creature around and slammed it to the floor with a sharp clang, connecting hard enough that he felt the steel plates reverberate under his feet. The thing’s head drooped on its broken neck, lolling sideways to expose the throbbing vessels beneath its gray flesh.
Only now did Maul allow himself to exhale. As anticipated, he hadn’t needed his lightsaber staff or the Force to dispatch this waste of flesh—not that either was really an option. Staring down into the thing’s face, he raised his foot and planted his heel in the exposed throat, ready to pulverize the trachea, or whatever the thing used for an airway, with one decisive stomp. For an instant he met its sagging, inarticulate eyes.
Now, he instructed the thing, which seemed to be realizing that it was destined to finish out the final pathetic seconds of its life here in nameless obscurity. Die.
All at once, with blinding speed, the creature yanked loose and burst upright, reaching behind its back to produce what appeared to be a long bow staff. As the staff blurred toward him, Maul realized that the weapon, which he’d first taken to be a piece of wood or some kind of biomechanical hybrid, was actually a living organism—a serpent whose head lashed out at lightning velocity, latching onto his face, slashing at his eyes.
Maul recoiled, but it was too late. With a jolt, his vision was gone, burying him in instant darkness. This was the second time in as many seconds that the thing had caught him off guard, and now he knew why: the creature was somehow cut off from the Force, utterly detached from the deep field of heightened sensitivity from which he was constantly drawing information about his surroundings. The intuitive sensory abilities that he took for granted in any normal battle were simply not there.
An acidic heaviness took hold of his optic nerves like a slow drip, seeping in, sinking deep, and he realized that he could already feel the poison taking control, spreading out in concentric layers of numbness through the muscle and tissue of his face.
Now the thing’s shrieking laughter was everywhere. Willful. Triumphant.
You must end this now.
Maul straightened. The voice in his head was his own, an austere evocation of his own training. But the cadence was unmistakably his Master’s—an echo of pitiless instruction, hours, days, years of unyielding pain and discipline. Sidious was never far from him. The evocation of the Sith Lord’s presence here snapped him back instantly into the moment with total clarity.
Reaching up through blindness, Maul took hold of the serpent, grappling with its fully extended length. Somewhere in the void he could feel the rippling leathery sinew of the staff looping around his neck, felt the hundreds of small muscles twisting and constricting over his windpipe, pinching off his airway like a living noose. The next few seconds would be crucial.
He flexed, bent his head, and jerked it forward, but the thing would not release. It kept encircling him, looping round and round, defying every attempt to take hold of it.
Maul willed himself to be absolutely still, a study in perfect rigidity, allowing the serpent, in its moment of fatal overconfidence, to draw tighter still, stretching itself until he sensed its head coming back around in front of him once more. Still he waited. Above it all he could smell his opponent’s fetid stench, could feel the claws of his opponent raking his skin, twisting into his face, gouging for purchase. It shrieked at him, and this time the cry was pure victory, what might even have been laughter. Starved, insane. A warrior with nothing to lose.
You are no warrior, Maul thought. You know nothing of the dark side.
The moment had come. He grasped the head of the amphistaff, seizing its blunt nose and fanged mouth. His fingers took hold of its distended upper part, twisting, wrenching, until he tore the serpent’s head off its body with a moist and meaty pop.
The results were instantaneous. With a twitching galvanic shudder, the snake loosened and fell slack, the coils already beginning to slide from his neck, and Maul allowed himself a single, unobstructed breath before finishing his work here.
Somewhere in front of him, the attacker had already responded to the death of his weapon with a howl of cheated rage. Maul no longer heard it. Primal as it was, it was still only emotion, a cry of weakness no more instructive or relevant than the pain he’d willed away moments earlier. He had no more use for it now than he ever did.
He did, however, take advantage of his opponent’s scream just long enough to reach into its open mouth, feeling the moist warmth of its breath on his hand as he retrieved his tooth, plucking it from the thing’s gums. Holding the mouth agape, Maul crammed the serpent’s severed head inside, then clamped the gray lips tight to keep the snake’s head from falling out. He ripped three of the larger piercings from the thing’s right arm and jammed them upward through the lips, bending them back into barbed hooks and fastening the mouth shut with the serpent’s head still trapped inside. With his hands flattened against those lips, Maul could feel the head twitching around inside the mouth, sinking its fangs in reflexively, squirting out venom while his attacker jerked and spasmed and tried in vain to scream.
End it.
Still sightless, now holding his opponent at arm’s length, Maul inclined his own head down. He thrust forward, driving his horns into the thing’s sagging eyes, feeling them crushed to jelly against his scalp.
The spasms stopped, and Maul stepped back, releasing the body, allowing it to collapse at his feet.
He blinked and narrowed his own still-burning eyes, clutching his tooth in his hand. His vision was already starting to come back in murky shades of gunmetal gray and metallic blue. The process was infuriatingly slow, but it was happening. There was no reason not to assume that within a few hours, he would be fully recovered, and when—
The floor began to shake.
Maul whipped around, scanning the depths of his cell for the vibration’s source. From all around him, a ratcheting cacophony had taken hold of the cell, the sound of massive chains being dragged through the sprockets and pulleys of some vast piece of clockwork. It filled the entire chamber, rising to a deafening roar. Everything around him had begun to shift and tilt. Maul reached out, fingertips confirming what he’d already begun to suspect.
The walls were closing in.
This was no illusion, no side effect of crippled vision. The cell itself was literally changing shape—the individual steel plates that formed the walls and floors and ceiling all overlapping and sliding together like great mechanical scales, curving inward as the slant of its floor became steeper, transforming into a kind of bowl, opening in the middle to create a funnel.
Reaching backward, Maul grabbed the handhold bolted into the bench behind him, clutching it for balance and holding on tight. All around him, the grating howl and shriek of metal got louder as a hole opened in the middle of the floor.
He furrowed his brow, squinting down into it. His vision had become clear enough now that he could make out the lifeless corpse of his former attacker, the thing in its broken and now utterly useless organic armor sliding downward toward the center of the cell. It sagged forward on a streaking smear of its own black blood, a slave to simple physics, its passage into oblivion followed in short order by the limp, decapitated body of the snake-staff.
Maul watched as warrior and staff both slipped through the hole and out of sight into a bath of darkness almost as deep as the one from which he himself had just emerged. For an instant—was it real?—he thought he saw something pale and eyeless reaching up to suck the bodies down.
The hole closed again and the floor shifted itself, smoothing out and becoming flat once more. The clanking and shaking stopped. The cell around him had resumed its previous rectilinear shape.
Somewhere in front of him, a panel of red lights blinked and went green.
He waited as the cell began to carry him upward.
Most helpful customer reviews
26 of 28 people found the following review helpful.
Maul Unleashed
By Arnold
Maul: Lockdown was a book I anticipated with a mix of hope and dread. Maul is one of my favorite Prequel characters and I was also excited to see Darth Plagueis again. However, Joe Schreiber is best known to Star Wars fans for his Deathtrooper horror novels, which might suggest that the book would be a shallow bloodfest. While Maul: Lockdown isn’t a perfect Star Wars novel, I was relieved to find that it succeeds more often than it fails.
VIOLENCE WARNING
Joe Schreiber comes to Star Wars from a background in horror novels and as expected this novel is pretty violent. I’d definitely not recommend it for younger readers. The fights are pretty gruesome, not just because of the deaths but graphic detail with which those deaths are depicted. We see prisoners bludgeoning each other to death and even pulling out the bones. I think Schreiber does a decent job setting expectations and pointing out that the prison, Cog Hive Seven, is supposed to be a brutal environment, but, if you’re not into horror and violence, think twice about this book. I found myself barely able to tolerate some scenes.
PLOT
The plot is fairly basic. Darth Sidious tasks Maul to track down a weapons dealer, Iram Radique, who is allegedly hiding within a prison aboard a space station, Cog Hive Seven. It’s a bit of a contrivance, but that’s how Schreiber manages to get Maul deep inside a prison. If you can accept that stretch, I actually think the idea of throwing Maul into a prison works pretty well. It’s a brutal environment in which everybody is out for him or herself. The dystopian setting almost reminded me of one of Alien 3 (and, yes, there’s even a monstrous alien in Maul: Lockdown that goes around killing prisoners).
For the first few chapters, Maul: Lockdown seems like it’s going to just focus on a series of fights between Maul and a variety of different opponents. Cog Hive Seven also conveniently forces its prisoners to engage in gladiatorial matches, allowing Schreiber to throw some bloody death matches in there. Fortunately, the novel is more than just death matches. By about halfway through the book, the plot thickens and the search for the weapons dealer is in full force. There’s still plenty of action, but I think Schreiber does a decent job making it serve the story rather than gratuitous violence for violence sake.
My problems with the book’s plot came more with how it was wrapped up, which I discuss separately in order to avoid spoilers.
CHARACTERS
Again, for a book that could have just been about gore and violence, some of the characters really do shine. Schreiber is good at creating pathetic characters who ironically feel well-rounded and believable. Too often, when Star Wars authors need a “scum & villainy” character, they create one-dimensional characters who are obviously mere plot devices. Schreiber’s characters are certainly not the best I’ve ever read in Star Wars, but one does get the sense that they at least possess two or three dimensions. Sadistic characters also have families and fears while pirates and inmates are not just boneheaded numbskulls – although those surely do exist as well. Sadiki Blirr, the warden of the prison, stood out as a female character who defied many stereotypes about female characters in Star Wars novels.
That said, with the possible exception of Sadiki and possibly one father-son pair of inmates, I don’t think I found myself caring about any of Schreiber’s new characters. They more than serve the story, but I viewed them as I view most characters in an Alien movie. Which ones are going to survive? How will they die? Will they help or hinder Maul?
Which brings me to Darth Maul. It’s actually been over a decade since we’ve gotten a book centered around Maul (Michael Reeves’ Shadow Hunter). Reeves’ Shadow Hunter used Maul as a largely silent antagonist lurking in the background, almost a personification of fear itself. However, Maul: Lockdown is definitely a book about Maul. Maul is the primary protagonist. This is his story. We see him in action a lot. I think Schreiber does a decent job incorporating what we now know about Maul’s intelligence and leadership skills from The Clone Wars into this pre-Phantom Menace version of Maul without eroding the mystique of the character. We even get to see Maul act as a gang leader, a nice nod to his role in The Clone Wars Season 5 episodes. Overall, this generally does feel like Darth Maul.
Which made me a bit disappointed that I felt like we didn’t learn much about Maul as a character. We see him in action, but actually don’t learn much about his history or psychology that we hadn’t learned in previous EU works. Of course, most of the time Maul is his usual tough-as-nails self and frightens people with a single glance. some one exceptions. Maul in Scheiber’s book does have fears. He isn’t always confident of success. He worries. At first, I found these character traits a bit off-putting. However, upon reflection, if the spends so much time with Maul I think it has to show him occasionally off his game. It makes him feel more like a real character. The important thing is to see how he overcomes the challenges he faces.
INCONSISTENCIES
I’m not a nitpicker for inconsistencies or gaps in logic when it comes to Star Wars. But this book had quite a few that bugged me. First, how would anybody, including the narrator, know what an amphistaff was? There is a Yuuzhan Vong in the prison and the prison wardens can’t identify his species, and the narrator never mentions the species, but does use the word “amphistaff.” Odd. Also, Schreiber uses “coffee” instead of “caf” to describe Star Wars coffee – something I am sure will upset many fans.
The whole story depends upon the prison staff and prisoners not knowing that Maul is a Sith. He avoids using the Force throughout much of the novel. However , this made me wonder why the prison wouldn’t have a midichlorian test to detect Force-users. I’d think prison staff would want to know.
None of these ruined the book for me, but they all occur early on and seemed a bit sloppy on Schreiber’s part.
ENDING
There were parts of the ending I hated and parts that I loved. I’ll try to provide a relatively spoiler free discussion of my ending, but also feel that I have to explain my rating for the book, so…
*** SPOILER WARNING ***
The biggest problem with the ending is something that plagues many Star Wars novels, namely a chaotic ending. Too many loose ends are tied up too quickly in an unsatisfying manner. I think the book would have worked better if more of the content had been spread out.
For example, the search for Iram Radique ends with a whimper, not a bang. I won’t say who he is or what happens, but it almost doesn’t matter because by the end the book doesn’t even give the reader the opportunity to absorb the impact of the conclusion to the mystery. It almost felt like Maul – and the reader – were being tugged along for this search just for the sake of giving Maul something to do in the prison but that Iram Radique himself and Maul’s mission were not important to the Sith Grand Plan.
There is a really neat tie-in to the game Bounty Hunter. We get to see another character and that character has more than a cameo role. Schreiber actually manages to give that character a bit of depth. But, again, all of this is thrown into the last quarter of the book or so where it’s competing with too much other action. I actually think the book would have been even better if that character had been introduced earlier so we could see even more interaction between Maul and that character. But overall I give credit to Schreiber for going back and using some of that older EU material.
At first I was very confused about the ending. We know early on he has to obtain a nuclear weapon from Iram Radique and that he has to transfer it to a certain group, but it’s not clear why Sidious would want this. Was this mentioned somewhere else in the EU? Well, it turns out that it ties directly into the Darth Plagueis novel in a very subtle way. In other words, Maul: Lockdown doesn’t explain why Maul went on this mission! You need to read Darth Plagueis FIRST in order to make sense of it and then to see why the mission was so important. It actually adds a really neat twist to Darth Plagueis.
*** END SPOILERS ***
CONCLUSION
Overall, I found myself liking Maul: Lockdown more than I'd expected to or feared. It’s important to go into this book knowing that it’s pretty dark and bloody. However, I think it should satiate Darth Maul fans and fans who want tense action scenes. I would have preferred the plot to have unfurled a bit more gradually and more emphasis on certain characters, but also appreciate that the characters felt more real than they had any right to be for this type of novel. Overall, I’d say if you like the Alien movies and you like Darth Maul, you’ll probably enjoy this novel.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
An excellent effort by Joe Schreiber
By David Pruette
Joe Schreiber’s new Star Wars book Maul: Lockdown created a real conundrum for me. Darth Maul and his master are evil characters, completely on the side of the bad guys in the Star Wars saga. The things they do are not what you would want your heroes to do. However, I found that in Lockdown I was pulling for Maul to win a string of victories and accomplish his goals. Clearly, I am headed toward the Dark Side.
Mr. Schreiber is not new to Star Wars readers. He also wrote Death Troopers and Red Harvest. None of the books are quite what would be thought of as normal Star Wars fare, and Maul: Lockdown continues in that vein. They are just very different. However, as you can see from my rating of the book, I liked this one. I did. I couldn’t help myself. Part of my reaction may be because recently I have been reading the early books of the New Jedi Order series, and they occasionally bog down in deep philosophical discussions of the Force and whether or not a true Jedi should actually be using the Force. It was kind of nice to get to a book that is basically nothing but action.
Darth Maul is locked up on a space-station penitentiary, Cog Hive Seven, a place that is teeming with the galaxy’s most hardened criminals. Of course, he is there as part of a plan developed by Darth Sidious, and his purpose is to infiltrate a criminal empire that operates from the penitentiary. Entertainment in the prison consists of almost constant death matches between inmates. Maul wins a match against hopeless odds as soon as he arrives at Cog Hive Seven. From there he goes on to win match after match, and he does it without using the Force and giving away that he is a Sith. Under the leadership of a completely Machiavellian warden, the penitentiary makes serious money by broadcasting the matches throughout the galaxy and taking a cut of the gambling proceeds.
The book is set in the time before The Phantom Menace so we know that Maul is going to survive. In some of his matches it is difficult to see how he is going to make it, but he does and he moves on with his quest. As I said earlier, I found I was pulling for him. The book is crammed with action and unusual characters and a setting that would look really good on film. Ridley Scott would be a good choice to direct it.
If you are at all interested in Darth Maul, this book is for you.
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful.
Surprisingly solid read
By J. Weaver
My hopes were rather low for this book, to be honest. To call a book about Darth Maul a "follow-up to Star Wars: Darth Plagueis" is a strange claim to begin with, as (there's no way to put this in a completely spoiler-free way) Maul is dead before that book ends. And the very first page of the novel features Maul in a pit fight with an unidentified alien who is clearly, no question about it, a Yuuzhan Vong... in a prison several decades before that race makes its presence known in the galaxy.
However, Schreiber's prose sucked me into the story almost immediately (my bafflement over the inclusion of the Yuuzhan Vong is the only thing that made it "almost" immediately), and Lockdown proved to be an engaging mystery thriller. On several occasions, I thought I'd figured out all the puzzles involved in Maul's quest to locate a secretive weapons dealer before he had done so, only for Schreiber to throw in a curveball and keep the story unpredictable to the end.
Though Lockdown doesn't feel like the typical Star Wars book (partly due to Maul's inability to use the Force so as to remain incognito), it's one of the most solid. My only issues with the book were very, very minor. First, there are several occasions where Maul COULD use the Force and still keep his identity secret, and it's unclear as to exactly why he doesn't. (I chalked this up to Maul not being nearly as smart as he thinks he is, and simply not realizing he's not quite as restricted as he believes.) Second, in addition to the Yuuzhan Vong's appearance, three other races that should be unknown in the galaxy (two who should be very primitive and confined to their own planets at this time, and one from the Unknown Regions) are represented in important roles. I blame this on bad editing, rather than bad writing; someone at Lucasfilm should've caught this error and corrected it.
Also, it did not bother me, but might some, so be warned: this book is far more violent and graphic in its descriptions of violence than any other Star Wars book I've read.
I would recommend Lockdown to any Star Wars fan, hardcore or casual, who can enjoy the violence. In fact, I'd passed on Schreiber's previous Star Wars novels since they both involve zombies and the premise sounded like a "grown-up" version of the cheesy old Galaxy of Fear books that were obviously inspired by the Goosebumps series, but I think I'll have to give them a shot based on how intriguing Lockdown proved to be.
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