This book is bonkers and fantastic and gets bogged down in the middle and sincerely freaked me out a few times. ( )

An american gothic thriller. Quite close to giving this 4 stars but it does take quite a while to get going. It was almost exactly half-way through that things finally started to get to a the point. The story builds up quite a bit of tension despite the rather formal language.
It's a surprisingly modern tale in terms of its violence, i suppose other gothic works like [b: Castle of Otranto|12923|The Castle of Otranto|Horace Walpole|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1390597628s/12923.jpg|46432] and [b: Vathek|859694|Vathek|William Beckford|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1338907992s/859694.jpg|980687] are violent too but its done in a much more over the top and less recognizable way. This felt in parts like an episode of Criminal Minds.
The resolution and final reveal are much better than i was expecting however the explanation doesn't re-iterate past events with any detail, so if you weren't paying attention before it won't do you much good.
If you want a properly dark and tragic mystery this might be for you, if you can get past the vocabulary. Also the very end is a sort of epilogue and felt quite pointless and a bit of a let down after the earlier climax.
This is still pretty shocking in places for a modern audience, i can't imagine how it must have been received in 1798. ( )

Eh. It was all right. Started out as a very intriguing ghost story and I was looking forward to finding out what was really going on. But the ending was a let-down. There were a couple of plot holes, even though the last chapter read entirely as an attempt to fill a couple of them. But it would probably make a great PBS miniseries. ( )

I really didn't like this book. At first, I thought it was because of the style of writing. This book was written in 1798, and it is a little difficult to get used to some of the conventions of that time period. But that wasn't it. Even excusing the writing style, I didn't like this book.

I didn't like the characters at all. Clara Wieland and her family all struck me as bored young men and women with nothing better to do than sit around gossiping. The "villian" of the piece, Carwin, reminded me of many of the villians in real life today who claim "It's not my fault. I couldn't help myself". He spent three chapters explaining how he just couldn't keep from using his "evil power" and came off sounding like a whiny adolescent.

But, worst of all, this is a book where NOTHING happens. The reader isn't shown anything; we're told the whole story. And, there's no indication of the "invisible power and nameless fear" mentioned on the back cover. There's just nothing spooky or suspenseful about this story.

I found the biography of the author from the 1856 Cyclopedia of American Literature, included in this volume, much more interesting than the novel. It seems Brown was quite prolific; as Wieland was his first published novel, it would be interesting to see if his later works improved. ( )

Our ancestors sought different pleasures in their reading than we do. Realism? That's what daily life is for. Authentic dialogue? Contrived eloquence is more pleasing. Plausibility? Thrills and towering passions are better. One should not merely "read" this book; one should "earnestly betake oneself to perusal" of it. There's one thing it has in common with modern-day thrillers: The protagonists are all superbly gifted, resourceful, and good-looking. Make that two things: The author seeks to spice up the tale with borrowings from the latest science. The book appeared in 1798, so that means the latest dope on spontaneous combustion, mania, and the obscure but powerful art of "ventrilocution."

N.B. The title character is a fictional cousin of a real German Romantic author (often forgotten today) named Christoph Martin Wieland. You might look him up.