Thread by @EaldWeald

Even from the Plantation Days, America was described as a "demon-haunted land"

So it's origination of "dark fiction" genre from Irving, Poe -> Lovecraft, Howard (-> LaFond) unsurprising, in keeping with the brutal urban life and savage frontiers

Land and populace contributed...

The combination of breakaway bourgeois, aristo, servile and rebellious/runaway types

The Red Indian indigenous influences, the Tropical African imports, the reversion to semi-Barbarism of some of the whites that came over

The Spenglerian "racial pseudomorphosis" of the land

Another feature that stands out is the high number of Utopian communal experiments that would have faced persecution in Europe, and yet despite free practice very few of these things ever made any lasting impact but rather were dissolved into the bizarre amalgamation

Strangely enough, the only place these kinds of experiments ever 'worked' long term in America are in exclusive 'burb enclaves, but even there they tend to dissolve over a generation because of the high rate of turnover -- community ever a transient thing in the 'Kwa

There is a serious founder effect thing going on too - the types mentioned above led to a cultural restlessness and dynamism unmatched abroad, and the vast spaces available for the taking only made this tendency more pronounced from the earliest times until our day