[Captain-Supervisor Grammel] walked over to the wall behind his desk. Taking a long thin bar of plastic from its place there, he pressed the switch at one end as he came back around the desk. "The conversation has been recorded," he informed them all.He depressed another switch and the bar showed a moving line of words across its waxy surface. When the record had finished, he raised and abruptly thrust one end of the unyielding plastic into the argumentative miner's left eye.
Blood and pulp squirted in all directions as the man collapsed, screaming, to the floor. One of his terrified companions bent over him, tried to staunch the flow of blood from the ruined socket. It ran in a steady stream down the man's face and coverall front.
Add to that some gruesome descriptions of burly Yuzzem brutes tearing apart stormtroopers, and vicious Coway troglodytes hacking wounded soldiers to pieces. Splinter is remarkably grim at times, and beyond the gore, has some downright creepy creature moments, with an enormous worm tearing through the swamp boles or a murky, gelatinous lake spirit making sure you won't ever find dark pools of water worth exploring. The superb comics adaptation done by Dark Horse toned down most of the carnage to keep the pages from being painted in red, but they did add to one scene: the death of the Imperial officer Grammel was described as a simple decapitation in the novel. The comic, instead, took some liberties:
