Wieland; Or, The Transformation

“Fate has done its worst,” Clara Wieland writes, insisting she has nothing left to fear—then dares her reader to believe a story no human experience can match.

In Charles Brockden Brown’s 1798 American tale, a once-peaceful family is shadowed by stern religious conviction and mysterious voices that unsettle what its members believe. Clara tells her story from the far side of catastrophe, tracing how her father’s early experiences shaped the household—and how the family’s confidence in what it hears begins to falter. Is the danger supernatural, born of human deception, or lodged in the mind itself? As Clara tries to account for the ruin around her, every explanation carries its own dread. What happened within the Wieland family—and can her account make the impossible credible?

With centuries of literature, it's inevitable that some will fall through the cracks. We hunt down public domain works and restore them so they're not lost to the world.

Who are we? We're Cairn Press. Our background is in design, publishing, typography, and technology. These skills fuel our mission to create the highest quality Public Domain eBooks available online, at an affordable price. We give them the treatment they deserve; our proprietary process restores books for a better overall user experience in design, readability, and e-reader compatibility.