Dune Messiah was very much not my kind of book, and for different reasons than I disliked Dune. While my criticism regarding Good vs Evil characters from the first volume isn't relevant to the second one, Frank Herbert's narration style of showing the thoughts of just about everybody felt like a giant "tell, don't show". I felt like the story just crawled along. Everything was overthought and overexplained, none of the characters were likeable in any way, and very little actually happened. I felt that the large time gap ("I don't want to be the messiah and cause a jihad" - 12 years later, guess what) took also part in my disbelief at the fact that there was nothing an emperor could do to at least mitigate the issues he suffered from. Ehh, I probably won't go on with the series.