100 Books Like Wieland

This 1834 novel written by a physician/writer from Philadelphia holds its own with anything Poe or Melville ever wrote in terms of weirdness, psychological complexity, and sheer literary panache. 

It tells the story of a singularly unambitious young man who accidentally kills himself and then discovers that he has the power to reanimate the corpses of others who have just died. And so our hero finds himself living the lives of a rich man with terrible gout, a playboy, a misguided Quaker philanthropist, and – most shockingly – a rebel slave. 

Through it all, Sheppard Lee still maintains a sense of his own identity, even as his spirit becomes something of a puppet for its new physical manifestations. Both philosophical and darkly comic, this recently rediscovered work should be a classic.

Early African American fiction is not as well-known as the slave narrative genre, but the few novels that do exist before the Civil War are sophisticated interpretations and developments of sentimental fiction. Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig is a bildungsroman charting the life of free Black servant girl Frado who is exploited and abused by her adopted white family. Wilson challenges the passive and flat portraits of Black men and women in most antebellum fiction, by portraying a complex and multifaceted character in Frado.

Another example of early African American fiction, The Garies and their Friends is the second novel published by a Black American. Following the lives of an interracial couple moving from Savannah to Philadelphia, their middle-class Black friends, and the racism they face, The Garies is one of the first texts to examine free Black life in depth. Writing an anti-racist novel, Webb criticizes the legal structures and extra-legal white supremacist violence that prohibit Black safety and success in the ‘free’ North.

Although Herman Melville is considered the most canonical US writer today, after the muddled reception of Moby-Dick (1851) his critical and commercial acclaim had waned. In response, he wrote the much-maligned Pierre, a sensational gothic novel about a young man discovering his half-sister and endeavoring to rescue her from poverty. Both sublime and ridiculous, this overly-wrought novel features spiritualism, incest, and diatribes against the literary marketplace, but most pressingly it probes the roles and responsibilities of young independent men in the mid-19th century. If you can find it, the 1995 Kraken edition features bold and brilliant illustrations by Maurice Sendak.

Hawthorne’s House has a little of everything: mystery, romance, the supernatural, family treachery, and a surprising dose of humor.

A family curse, dating back to the days of New England witch trials, hangs over a present-day (1850s) land dispute, pitting strange but lovable Hepzibah and Clifford Pyncheon against their scheming, powerful cousin Jaffrey.

While much of the Gothic plot concerns the way the past controls the present, the novel also involves technologies that will help shape the future: photography (which is linked here to spiritualism) and, in one memorable scene, the railroad.

The popularity of the book and its 1940 film adaptation helped make the house that inspired Hawthorne a tourist attraction (which I also highly recommend) in Salem, Massachusetts.

This might seem like a strange pick, since it’s almost never described in terms of Gothicism.

Douglass’s narrative is essential reading regardless—a compelling narrative and one of the masterpieces of nineteenth-century literature. What makes it Gothic? In Douglass’s world, nothing is what it appears to be, because slavery has corrupted not only institutions but virtually all personal relationships. There are trap doors everywhere and a constant threat of violence.

A century and a half before Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Douglass’s book describes the Gothic horror of everyday life under slavery.

No one reads this book nowadays, but in the 1840s and 50s, readers were captivated: it was the nation’s most popular novel. Published in monthly installments, the style is lurid, hallucinatory, a fever delirium, as befits a hastily improvised serial novel written by Edgar Allen Poe’s bestie.

The plot is impossible to summarize, but try this: “Monks Hall” is a place where Philadelphia’s elite—politicians, ministers, publishers, medical professors, businessmen, judges, and lawyers—go to fraternally seduce and rape virgins, torture and murder their enemies, and revel in their hypocrisy. And the ringleader, or maybe just the concierge, is Devil-Bug, a ghoulish murderer, blackmailer, thief, and bodysnatcher.

The novel consists of a succession of terrible things these terrible men do to good women, orphans, and weak men. One bad thing after another… It’s like Dickens on a bad acid trip. And, of course, anatomy figures. I’ll just cite two memorable scenes. First,… show more.

Dickinson isn’t always Gothic, but many of her best and best-known poems revolve around that central Gothic question: what is it like to be dead?

Poems beginning with lines like “I heard a Fly buzz—when I died,” “Because I could not stop for Death,” “If I may have it, when it’s Dead,” and “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” play along the boundary between the living and the dead and ask uncomfortable questions about the afterlife, such as whether there is one.

It’s surely no coincidence that her creative peak coincided with the Civil War. But what makes Dickinson so compelling, for me at least, is her unique vocabulary, which suggests fears and other (sometimes ecstatic) emotions that no one else has managed to describe. Her poems are full of surprise and mystery.

This edition reproduces Dickinson’s own collections of her poems—“fascicles” or homemade books—giving… show more.

I was hooked by the unexpected opening sentence: "The first time I saw my granddaughters, I was standing across the street, didn't dare go any closer."

What had gone wrong? Why was a grandmother so estranged from her own grandchildren?

As the novel unspooled, it double-backed into other surprise twists, and the characters and motivations weren't as clear-cut as they'd seemed. Leah, the mother of the two granddaughters, wasn't being juvenile, impulsive, or heartless when she broke off contact with her parents. Yoella, the grandmother, wasn't as loving and innocent as she thinks she was—and how much does she realize, in fact?

I loved the way the book sometimes said more between the lines than in the actual words. 

Kit Quinn is a psychologist who is brutally attacked by a prisoner while working. The same prisoner is under suspicion of murder and Kit is called in.

She, however doesn’t think they have the culprit. So ensues a fast-paced race to solve the case. This was one of the first psychological thrillers I ever read and served as a fantastic intro to the genre. It probably pushes the boundaries of believability but it remains one of my favourite books