11-11-2012, 03:46 PM
(07-27-2010, 02:42 AM)Penfeather Wrote: I should also mention Wieland (or The Transformation) by Charles Brockden Brown. Brown was a Regency-era novelist and historian who set the stage for Edgar Poe and Wm. Hope Hodgson. Brown was definitely classified as a "Gothic" writer in his own time, though his plotlines don't necessarily conform to the modern formula. His prose has a florid otherworldliness of style that puts the reader in a kind of lucid trance.
I read Wieland while staying alone in a cabin on a lake in the middle of the woods, and it made me sleep with the light on. Even then I did not sleep very well.
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/792
But it is not really very good, now is it? While it has creepy elements, the utter preposterousness of the basic premise (SPOILER based on a misconception of what ventriloquism can actually achieve) was widely noted already in the author's own time. As this is often referred to as The First American Novel, one has to wonder what the competition was like.