"They just...eat."
This is not your average Star Wars novel. Indeed, many readers consider it one of the creepiest such stories, bearing more in common with Dead Space than with the rest of the franchise.
- The novel is loaded with it, mostly through the descriptions of peoples' deaths and certain plot points in the latter half, most notably of which are the cannibalistic Imperial survivors that try to eat Sartoris and the appropriately-dubbed "skin hill" that Trig finds made of limbs, corpses and zombified remains—including his brother, who has half his head missing.
- The contagion itself that causes the zombies, even more so than versions of The Virus in other media. Not only does it create zombies, not only can it be transmitted through contact, water and air (though people who are highly force sensitive are safe from airborne transmission and airborne is only possible in a hot zone literally saturated with viral particles), the plague is self aware and can control the zombies as one. It is directed in its actions and what it wants is to infect everything that exists.
