A baby is smothered to death by its mother. Another baby is blown to bits by its mother. One man has weights attached to his ankles and is drowned in a vat of excrement. A character strangles his father and has his grandfather tossed off a cliff. There is a prolonged death by bull-goring, and the drugging and violent rape of a Bene Gesserit woman. One woman is raped to death by hundreds of men, another put in a tank and turned into a mindless chemical factory, a third leaps out a window to her death. Soldiers are flayed alive, others have their legs sliced off. At least half a dozen eyeballs get skewered on knives.

A Fremen slices himself open, another is eviscerated by a sandstorm. A traitor has his eyes, ears, tongue and hands sliced off as punishment. There are dozens of deaths by poison. One man is torn to pieces by a pack of dogs. An entire village goes mad to the point that its citizens smear their bloody innards on walls. A woman is stabbed to death by a “psychic” blade. A dozen whales are brutally gored to death. An 8-year-old boy watches his mother get shot in the head.

Wait, I’m not done. Men get eaten by sandworms. On about a dozen occasions, soldiers from one house or another gleefully fire lasguns into crowds and (specifically) cut down women, children and the elderly. Innocent bystanders are slaughtered by the tens of thousands in battles, explosions. A nuclear conflagration blinds a quarter of a planet’s citizens. Dozens of nameless henchmen are tortured, mutilated, stabbed, raped and strangled in graphic detail. Prisoners are framed and executed to public applause. Heads hang on spikes. Corpses are hung on walls to rot. Blood drips from ceilings and puddles on floors. A group of scientists leap into a living vivisection machine, causing blood, gore and body parts to spray all over the attending crowd.

Had enough? I could go on.

We all understand that humans are violent creatures. Frank Herbert, author of the original Dune books, was not above the occasional scene of shocking brutality. But too often Herbert fils and hired gun Kevin Anderson settle for such graphic sensationalism in lieu of subtlety or insight. There’s no need to chastise the authors for not slavishly imitating the beloved originals — but couldn’t they have peeled back the covers on Herbert pere’s grand mythic and ecologic themes, just a little bit?

Instead we get gore, buckets of it. Alongside the gore the authors meticulously develop plots and counter-plots over hundreds of pages. Much of the royal intrigue is quite clever, but like the bloodshed, excessive. We get to learn the background stories behind many of the minor characters in the original Dune series (including Duncan Idaho, Liet Kynes, Emperor Shaddam, and others). But many of these tales would have been better left as unexplored bits of background texture. (Was anyone really clamoring to know how “Beast” Rabban got his nickname?)

Certain other major characters are diminished by their extended treatment. As written by Frank Herbert, Baron Vladimir Harkonnen was a ruthless and villainous antagonist to the Atreides family, not above the occasional bit of sadism to get his way; as written by Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson, he’s a cartoon, constantly going out of his way to sodomize, pillage, maim and torture the innocent. (And let’s not ignore the fact that the prequel authors play up and make an issue of the Baron’s homosexual tendencies in a way that smacks of gay-baiting.)

Probably the greatest sin that the Dune prequels commit is the same sin that The Phantom Menace committed by revealing C-3PO’s creator: they’ve made a much-studied and richly detailed universe a smaller place.