united states

I was pleased to see that the editorial review of this (typically gorgeous) Library of America series entry stole my breath. Brockden Brown's fascinating and brutal gothic novels are the true foundation of what's dark about American literature. Perhaps even more irresponsible than Poe in his fascination with the grotesque (spontaneous combustion, anyone?), Brockden Brown long anticipates Poe and Freud (and Faulkner and Jackson and ...) in his bleak explorations of our most terrible fears, and our worst secrets. Without scenes like the axe murder in "Wieland," would we have King's (or Kubrick's) "The Shining"? Impossible. Let's hope that the Library of America will add a Volume 2 to this one, including Brockden Brown's lesser known (and impossible to find) works like "Ormond."

Charles Brockden Brown is known as the "Father of the American novel" and is considered to be our first professional author. At least by those who do consider him at all. To be perfectly frank, I'd never really heard of the guy before now. But this excellent gothic tale, which was based on the true story of a farmer who thought that angels had commanded him to kill his own family, is so clearly the forerunner of the fiction of everyone from Hawthorne and Melville to Poe and Henry James to H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard right on up to Shirley Jackson and Stephen King, that it is hard to believe that his work is not better known nor taught more often.

Wieland, his first novel, tells the story of a religious fanatic who builds a temple in the seclusion of his own farm, but then is struck dead, apparently by spontaneous combustion. Several years later, his children, in turn, begin to hear voices around the family property, voices which alternately seem to be commanding good or evil and which at times imitate denizens of the farm. Are the voices somehow connected to a mysterious visitor who has begun hanging around? Are they commands from God? From demons? Suffice it to say things get pretty dicey before we find out the truth.

This is a terrific creepy story which obviously influenced the course of American fiction. Brown develops an interesting serious theme of the role that reason can play in combating superstition and religious mania, but keeps the action cranking and the mood deliciously gloomy. The language is certainly not modern but it is accessible and generally understandable. It's a novel that should be better known and more widely read, if not for historical reasons then just because it's great fun.

GRADE: A

The Library of America is providing a valuable service to all devotees of American literature by providing reliable texts of so many important American writers. Here, they have done an excellent job of presenting the three best novels of America's first professional novelist. However, Brown only wrote six novels altogether, and anyone who cares about "Wieland," "Edgar Huntly," and "Arthur Mervyn" will probably also want "Ormond" in the package, as well as the fragments "Memoirs of Stephen Calvert" and "Memoirs of Carwin, the Biloquist."