2009
11.28

The Dark Side of Reading: ‘Star Wars: Death Troopers’

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Someone is killing your favorite Star Wars characters. No, it’s not George Lucas again. This time around, the culprit is Joe Schreiber, author of Star Wars: Death Troopers. This looks like the greatest book ever.

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The synopsis reads:

When the Imperial prison barge Purge–temporary home to five hundred of the galaxy’s most ruthless killers, rebels, scoundrels, and thieves–breaks down in a distant, uninhabited part of space, its only hope appears to lie with a Star Destroyer found drifting, derelict, and seemingly abandoned. But when a boarding party from the Purge is sent to scavenge for parts, only half of them come back–bringing with them a horrific disease so lethal that within hours nearly all aboard the Purge die in ways too hideous to imagine.

And death is only the beginning.

The Purge’s half-dozen survivors–two teenage brothers, a sadistic captain of the guards, a couple of rogue smugglers, and the chief medical officer, the lone woman on board–will do whatever it takes to stay alive. But nothing can prepare them for what lies waiting aboard the Star Destroyer amid its vast creaking emptiness that isn’t really empty at all. For the dead are rising: soulless, unstoppable, and unspeakably hungry.

Schreiber is the author of the horror novels Chasing the Dark, Eat the Dark, and No Doors, No Windows.

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2009
11.28

‘Silent Hill’ Writer Roger Avary Tweets Himself to the Slammer!

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Silent Hill and Pulp Fiction scribe Roger Avary has better keep an eye on his holiest of holies. The Oscar-winning writer has been taken out of a work furlough program and locked up in a California jail to serve the remainder of his one-year sentence for a DUI accident that left his passenger dead and his wife injured.

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Avary was sentenced in September to one year in jail and five years probation. A processing error, however, placed the 44-year-old in a work furlough program, where he was allowed to keep a day job and only required to bunk with fellow program members on nights and weekends. Unfortunately for Avary, his compulsive 12-year-old girl-like tweeting habit alerted authorities to the mistake. He was moved to California’s Ventura County jail yesterday.

Tweeting as @avary and referring to himself as #34, Avary updated followers with Tweets such as:

#34’s new roomie, EZ, takes YeYo’s old bunk, locker, AND number. He regales awesome tales about his former life as an Oxnard gangbanger.

and:

Wash Day! The ‘clean sheets’ reek from the nut sweat of a thousand men. Pubes & hair must be peeled off before making your bunk.

Avary’s last tweet stated:

34 is rolled up to a ‘higher security’ facility for exercising his first amendment rights. The truth he has discovered is too dangerous.

Ventura County sheriff’s spokesman Capt. Ross Bonifiglio has denied that Avary’s tweeting led to the incarceration, simply citing security issues as a key factor.

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Avary had signed on to write a sequel to Davis Films’ Silent Hill in September. It’s unclear if he’s still on board to do so. Silent Hill was distributed by TriStar and earned $47 million domestically in 2006. The surreal and creepy frightener is based on the critically-acclaimed Konami video game of the same name.