The history of the “supernatural novel” is occluded – even occulted – by problems of definition. The first problem is with the term “novel.” The writer at the center of any discussion of the supernatural, Edgar Allan Poe, notoriously favored the short work, because “[T]here is a distinct limit, as regards length, to all works of literary art – the limit of a single sitting.” Many of the most famous nineteenth-century supernatural works are short stories, or at longest novellas; in the twentieth century, supernatural novels are plentiful, but they often become most visible when they are adapted into horror films. A greater problem is “supernatural,” which colloquially signals ghosts, haunting, devils, and the spirit-world. If these are its defining features, how is the American supernatural to be distinguished from “American gothic,” which is a more established critical category? Both the gothic and the supernatural are anti-realist zones of haunting and strangeness, but the supernatural also crosses over into a world of spirits, as the gothic need not; conversely, the gothic always invokes fear, while the supernatural may offer friendly ghosts. Most supernatural texts are gothic, but not all, and vice versa, or as one critic puts it, “The supernatural is permitted but not essential to the Gothic.” The supernatural is not only dificult to separate spatially from other genres; it is also often only a temporary zone within individual works, entered and then abandoned as other explanations for mysteries arise. In Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland (1798), for example, the narrator considers “notions of supernatural agency” as the source for the mysterious voices she hears, only to have their human source revealed.