Brown was the first professional American novelist (i.e., the first to
write for his living). "Wieland" (1798) is a Gothic novel that has the
distinction of being the forerunner of the HIBK school (Had I But
Known), told in the first person by a woman, and a precursor of the
thriller. By modern standards it is poorly written and plotted, with
all the supernatural trappings of a European Gothick, except for the
American setting in Pennsylvania. But it does have amusing features
that make it worth reading still. For example, this classic line: "The
gulf that separates man from insects is not wider than that which
severs the polluted from the chaste among women." Generally, the prose
is very turgid, although in very clearly written English. Occasionally
there are lapses into bathos, such as this bit, perhaps reflecting the
author's Quaker background -- "Great God! Thou witnessedst the agonies
that tore my bosom at that moment! thou witnessedst my efforts to repel
the testimony of mine ears!"
But the villain is quite good, in the best tradition of the Gothick:
"Bloodshed is the trade and horror is the element of this man. The
process by which the sympathies of nature are extinguished in our
hearts, by which evil is made our good, and by which we are made
susceptible of no activity but in the affliction and no joy but in the
spectacle of woes, is an obvious process. As to alliance with evil
genii, the power and the malice of demons have been a thousand times
exemplified in human beings. There are no devils but those which are
begotten upon selfishness and reared by cunning." Very well put in a
deistic rational fashion popular among the Jeffersonians of the time.
It might make this pretty good thriller inaccessible to modern readers,
although the style is perfectly understandable English, to have to
wade through syntax like the following: