Wieland by Charles Brockden Brown

Back in the olden days when I was in high school and college, I am pretty sure we were taught that James Fenimore Cooper was the first American novelist. Now a younger and more well educated friend tells me that Brown is considered America's first professional novelist. Internet research tells me that there were indeed novelists previous to Brown, but they were all women, so I guess they don't count. (Being snarky; actually the ladies were evidently not very proficient at the craft.) At any rate, Brown was indisputably America's first Gothic writer, following an English/European trend of the time.

Written in 1798, Wieland is a most intriguing and passionate account of strange and deadly events in the family of Clara, an intelligent and perceptive young lady who is telling the story in a letter to a friend. As a participant in the tragedy, she would automatically be suspected of being an unreliable narrator. She even says, "What but ambiguities, abruptnesses, and dark transitions, can be expected from the historian who is, at the same time, the sufferer of these disasters?" Included in her "letter" are two even more suspect accounts, being told second hand, explanatory of the mysterious happenings. We are purposefully left a bit unsure about whether events are explainable, of supernatural origin, or a product of a diseased mind---or a combination of all three.

Included in the catalog of bizarre happenings: a spontaneous combustion, apparently disembodied voices heard by several participants, and the murder of his entire family by a father. Ventriloquism and a suggestion of mesmerism also figure into the inventive plot. The psychological aspect must have been especially innovative at the time, examining as it does a man who truly believes that he has received commands from God to sacrifice his loved ones.

Brown has included more here than just a suspenseful story. The novel also cautions about the perils of religious fanaticism, as well as the perils of trusting entirely to one's senses.

This novel will be slow at times for a modern reader, as is common for the writing of the time. But when Brown gets going on actual events, he really gets going. If the reader will read slowly, re-reading as necessary, the tension and suspense is equivalent to watching the movie Psycho, for example. Recommended. It beats the heck out of James Fenimore Cooper.