Usually I keep a novel or two ready on my Kindle on nights when I am not about to fall asleep. Unfortunately, reading 19th century novelists can sometimes keep you up at night. This was my experience with Irish author Sheridan Le Fanu, but was rarely my experience with 18th Century authors, until now. Wieland by Charles Brockden Brown is one of the most frightening books I have read. This predecessor to the Gothic novel, predating Poe, makes Stephen King like reading a Peanut cartoon. Brown creates a world and characters with the sparsest of terms and descriptions. Almost every revelation about his characters has to do with their inner life. Odd details, like the religious fanatic father who spontaneously combusts, are left unresolved so that the line between the naturally strange and the supernaturally strange is removed. Read in the day time!