House Harkonnen is the middle volume of the prequel to Frank Hebert's legendary series as written by his son Brian Hebert and Kevin J. Anderson, and as anyone with a passing knowledge of the Dune universe could have told you without looking, the very title of this book bodes badly for everyone.

The story lines begun in House Atreides continue briskly onward, and many of the characters that Dune fans are familiar with come into their recognizable selves in this volume, but that's where the good news ends. Even members of House Harkonnen suffer terrible setbacks and tragedy in this book, and all the reader can do is hold on, knowing that it has to get better eventually. Doesn't it? To draw quick comparison, House Harkonnen is to this trilogy as The Empire Strikes Back is to the original Star Wars trilogy. Except more tragic. (And no carbonite.)

The one serious flaw of the book is to be found in its construction. As a collaborative effort which follows several storylines on many worlds, it follows that the story should be written in segments, each writer drawing from Frank Hebert's notes and their own imagination for each scene. In practice, this works well most of the time; many of the events happen simultaneously, or in close succesion, and the sections are usually short and to the point allowing the story to progress along the several paths at once without the reader losing track of which characters are where.

The problem is that many of these segments include pieces of the backstory, previous happenings, or re-statements of the various characters' respective motivations and goals, and this results in a large amount of unecessary repetition of already-known information. A better job of editing would have shortened this book by nearly 100 of its 720+ pages, and this poor reader would have been able to get through the suffering of his favorite characters more quickly.

On to House Corrino!