Frank Herbert is best known for “Dune,” the famed science fiction novel later expanded to a series. Thankfully, I read those books before David Lynch ruined the story with his movie. This 1972 mainstream work of fiction is currently out of print. I long ago lost my copy of “Dune” and its sequels, but I held onto this, perhaps because of my interest in Native American culture (my college minor). It has a rather dark ending — to say more would be a spoiler — that still feels like a sucker punch years later. The book leaves it to the reader to decide whether the supernatural elements are real or just some type of schizophrenic hallucination. The narrative style is also interesting, with shifting points of view. Is it a great book? After skimming its pages again, I’d say probably not, though I recall being quite impressed with it way back when I was more impressionable. That said, there are no passages as grandly memorable as the famous Zenlike “fear is the mind killer” quote from “Dune.”
[Originally posted on my discontinued This Old Book Tumblr.]