Providence #3

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Providence is a meditation on what true Horror is, not just jump-scares for fun. There are no jump-scares here, only an insidious reconfiguration of reality and how it will make the reader question reality after they finish reading. Reading the story at once instead of waiting for a new chapter every month is a more complete experience. Events and details that are introduced or foreshadowed early on become more apparent when they're paid off later. In Alan Moore's most carefully considered work in decades, Moore deconstructs all of Lovecraft's concepts, reinventing the entirety of his work inside a painstakingly researched framework of American history. Both sequel and prequel to Neonomicon, Providence begins in 1919 and blends the mythical visions of HP Lovecraft flawlessly into the cauldron of racial and sexual intolerance that defined that era on the East Coast of America. Every line from artist Jacen Burrows is perfectly honed to complete this immersive experience. The result is a breathtaking masterpiece of sequential art that will define modern horror for this generation. Invoking a comparison it to a prior literary masterpiece is not something to be handled lightly, but in scope, importance and execution: Providence is the Watchmen of horror. Providence is a twelve-issue comic book limited series written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Jacen Burrows, [1] published by American company Avatar Press from 2015 to 2017. The story is both a prequel and sequel to Moore's previous stories Neonomicon and The Courtyard, and continues exploring H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. [2] [3] Synopsis [ edit ]

Providence is one of Alan Moore's most ambitious final projects, a " Watchmen of Horror", as it were. By that, he meant a full-on deconstruction and metacommentary on the entirety of Lovecraft's body or work and the subtexts of racism, gynophobia and paranoia. It's like a kind of Unified Theory of Lovecraft Stories. And the incomparable Jacen Burrows' precise line art charts all the creepy horror and crawling chaos with unflinching exactness Readers with a better grasp of NYC history and geography, please comment. This appears to be a Bryant Park slightly different that what actually existed in 1919. While this may seem like a stretch, a Google images search for ads for Lowney’s Cocoa in fact tends to support this theory. The lettering on the ads falls into a few standard arrangements, one of which is quite similar to the one depicted here, but with the letters noticeably compressed and shifted. First appearance of Mrs. Ortega, Providence‘s equivalent for the Spanish landlady Mrs. Herrero of Lovecraft’s story “Cool Air.” Robert arrives in Providence to meet Henry Annesley, a scientist who has developed a pair of spectacles through which he can see the extra-dimensional organisms which overlap our plane of reality. Annesley, a member of Stella Sapiente, tells Robert some of the group's history, and introduces him to Howard Charles, a young genealogist. Annesley observes that Robert and Howard are sexually attracted to each other, and suggests Howard show Robert some of the local landmarks associated with the 'Stell Saps'. Howard takes Robert to St. John's Church where occult meetings were once held in the steeple. They go inside and discover a shining trapezohedron in a box, in fact the very same meteorite that fell to Earth in Manchester. Howard seduces Robert, and they have sex while looking into the alien stone. Afterwards, Robert calls on H. P. Lovecraft at his home. Lovecraft helps Robert find lodgings, and then Robert accompanies him to visit his mother in the mental hospital. Robert waits while Lovecraft sees his mother and pretends not to overhear their exchange. Lovecraft rejoins him and they depart. Lovecraft's mother looks on after them, and sees the same weird creatures in the air that Annesley does through his spectacles.Providence isn’t an attempt to subvert Lovecraft’s work: it’s a meta-story that enfolds Lovecraft’s canon… It’s got some really interesting things to say about fiction and authorship and the nature of reality itself, as well as the unlikely and uncannily outsized role that a dime-novel crank like Lovecraft would have on Western culture. Moore, with his understanding of how magic works, believes that influential narratives don’t “just” happen by chance, nor are they entirely the product of their authors: they’re the projections of forces from within the Immaterial that are deliberately inserting themselves into our dimension. - Ryan Miga

Apparently, some readers went insane and even committed suicide”– A reference to the first story of The King in Yellow, “The Repairer of Reputations.” After you finish this journey, you might realize (like I did) that the experience was so epic that you want to ride the roller coaster again. If this happens to you, I recommend going through the graphic novels a second time with an in-depth guide which you can find here: Leticia's rape, and the rape scene in Providence #6, illuminates a tension in Moore's work between freedom of expression and the potency of language. On the one hand, Moore agrees with the Crumbian argument that comics are just “lines on paper, folks,” inherently distant from the real world and thus free to tell disturbing, immoral stories; this is his defense for the pederasty and bestiality of the final volume of Lost Girls (2006). On the other hand, Moore believes that language (and, by extension, media like comics that include words) can magically transform human consciousness and influence the world. Do words matter? Do lines matter? Do comics matter? Should artists follow their inspirations, no matter how perverse or taboo, or should they be aware of the real-life ramifications of their dreams made manifest? Visits to the library… the park there, by that little stream… fed from the old reservoir before the library was there” refer to Bryant Park, shown on P1 and annotated there. Moore thereby opens and closes Providence #1 with Bryant Park.

All of Lovecraft is Here, Even Lovecraft Himself

In any ambitious work there’s always a tension between making something engaging/fun to experience …and pulling off whatever (structural, narrative, meta-referential) conceit the author hoped to accomplish. Like writing an enjoyable song, but the songwriter is also committed to a separate project of writing it in odd time signatures with unusual chord progressions. The latter endeavor is at odds with the former, but when both align - something truly exceptional is achieved. Khalid Ibn Yazid” is Moore’s invention, not to be confused with Khalid ibn Yazid al-Shaybani who would have lived a century later. As becomes clearer in later issues, Khalid Ibn Yazid is Providence’s analogue for Lovecraft’s “mad Arab” Abdul Alhazred author of the dreaded Necronomicon. The King in Yellow(1895) is the weird masterpiece of American writer Robert W. Chambers. It is a series of interconnected short stories which combine fantasy, science fiction, experimental fiction, and realistic works based in part on Chambers’ experiences in Paris. Highlights include the eponymous play The King in Yellow, the Yellow Sign, and the locations of Carcosa and the Lake of Hali that are all associated with the macabre, unseen figure of the King in Yellow entity. In writing the book, Chambers drew on the creations of Hastur, Carcosa, and Hali from fellow American writer Ambrose Bierce. Chambers’ work inspired H. P. Lovecraft and others to include references to Chambers’ mythology in their own fiction. Today, the subset of fiction centered around The King in Yellow is known as the Yellow Mythos, and has recently seen a resurgence in interest due to its adoption in the first series of True Detective. If this isn’t offensive enough, Moore defines his characters in ways that allow him to both critique and wallow in Lovecraft’s prejudices. Lovecraft was racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic: as a young man, he wrote a poem titled “On the Creation of Niggers” (1912), which is as horrible as it sounds, and Lovecraft’s estranged wife claimed that his virulent anti-Semitism destroyed their relationship. (In November 2015, the World Fantasy Awards dropped the look of their trophy, a Gahan Wilson-designed bust of Lovecraft, over increasing complaints about Lovecraft’s xenophobia.) As Moore himself writes in his introduction to The New Annotated H.P. Lovecraft (2014): “Far from outlandish eccentricities, the fears that generated Lovecraft’s stories and opinions were precisely those of the white, middle-class, heterosexual, Protestant-descended males who were most threatened by the shifting power relationships and values of the modern world” (xiii). Lovecraft expressed his prejudices most directly, however, in the nearly one hundred thousand letters he wrote to friends and fellow writers; in his published fiction, it’s mostly hints and metaphors, as in the miscegenation terrors of “The Shadow over Innsmouth” and the latent homophobia / homoeroticism of “Herbert West: Reanimator” (1922), which Noah Berlatsky traces in his review of a volume of earlier comics adaptations of Lovecraft.

I didn't know what to expect from this except that it would be pretty twisted. I was not disappointed. This is not a graphic novel compendium for kids-- it deserves just about every trigger warning one could need. Moore transgresses many taboos in re-inventing and synthesizing Lovecraft's (and his broader circle's) ideas from a modern, very very dark perspective. And in the process he takes a cold hard look at himself, and fandom, and its dark sides. This is a farewell critique of himself as well as an incredibly meticulously researched homage to Lovecraft et al.

Alan Moore's Showcase of True Horror

This street view should be easy to nail down (hardware, hat shop, H&H, hotel – all Hs?), but we haven’t been able to find it. It should be between Herald Square and Madison Square which are connected by Broadway… but the scale looks more like an east-west street, than Broadway? And so we arrive at Providence, which is, at least so far, a prequel to The Courtyard and Neonomicon, set in the same fictional world. There are numerous connections between all three works. The domed cities of The Courtyard and Neonomicon, for instance, are explained in Providence as a defense against dangerous meteorites, following an 1882 crash in Manchester, New Hampshire that brought a pestilence to the land. Moore and Burrows’ meteorite is borrowed directly from Lovecraft’s short story “The Colour Out of Space” (1927), and in Providence Moore assembles the major Lovecraft characters, locales, and plots into a single coherent narrative. By re-envisioning both Lovecraft and his own earlier contributions to the Cthulhu Mythos, Moore creates a network of allusions that supports all the events of Providence’s plot. It’s possible to read and understand Providence without a familiarity with Lovecraft, The Courtyard, and Neonomicon, but I wouldn’t want to. Charles wears a red (bow) tie which was a covert homosexual sign, per commenter Nate according to the book Gay New York. When Brears’ situation becomes even more horrible in the Beeks’ torture pool, Moore makes provocative creative choices when representing her victimization. As she is raped, Brears passes out, but even her dreams have been colonized: she envisions herself naked in a Lovecraftian city, as Johnny Carcosa strolls into her subconscious, speaks with her, and kisses her. In a curiously affectless tone, Brears seems to eroticize the rape as she describes her plight to Carcosa: