Aliens: Earth Hive Book

I really wanted to like this book more. I've been fascinated with the Xenomorphs for quite a while now, and I purchased this around the time Prometheus was released. Interestingly enough, the Engineers actually do feature here, although I am unable to discern as yet how everything fits together. That's tie-in fiction for you. Earth Hive was released in the early 1990s and is book 1 in the Aliens series, but details about Xenomorph behaviour, biology and society is so sparse, and treated so peripherally, that it reads more like a footnote of something much larger. All this novel basically tells you about the Aliens, is that they have heads like bananas. Yes, bananas. Obviously, the assumption is that anybody who is reading this at least knows what the Xenomorphs look like, otherwise this is open to serious misinterpretation. Is the novel scary? No. Is the novel atmospheric? No. In short, it's not really a novel about Aliens (they don't feature "on page" nearly enough). It's a novel about corporations who want to use the Aliens as biological weapons, and that idea is also pretty old by now (or at least, it was already old in the 1990s). At first I wasn't sure whether the brusque writing style and dialogue should be described as "workmanlike" or "awkward". In the end I decided on "awkward". This is only recommended for die-hard Alien fans, although it just left me intrigued enough to consider reading the sequel (Aliens: Nightmare Asylum) at some point.