This really was amazing—and actually terrifying. I had always thought of American gothic fiction as beginning with Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville, but Weiland was published shortly before those authors were born. Lovecraft considered it a Radcliffe imitation, and there's no doubt of her influence, but Brown wasn't merely transplanting gothic paraphernalia to a Pennsylvania setting; he was establishing a distinct school that could speak to the distinct anxieties of a new republic.
Moreover, what H. P. called the "lame ventriloquial explanation" is not just a Radcliffian explaining away of the supernatural: it's the central metaphor of a novel about rhetoric, about the force of inner and outer voices to move and shape our frighteningly mutable selves. Far from making the strange and irrational comfortingly explicable, Brown draws us further into fearful doubt. The full title of the novel is Wieland: or, The Transformation: An American Tale and that's important.