A review by otterno11
Providence Compendium by Alan Moore

adventurous dark medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.5

 

“I mean, I don’t know much about the occult, but I’d have thought serious philosophers should be above all that.”- Robert Black

“‘Course they should! They talk about distant stars, an’ eternity’s depths, an’ how man ain’t nothin’, though respectable society is, seems like.”- Garland “Warlock” Wheatley 

Providence Act 4

“I had a bad time in New England.” Robert Black

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Compiling all twelve issues of Alan Moore’s dense, complex Providence series into one volume, the Providence Compendium is a dense, though intriguing, deconstruction of Lovecraft and the Cthulhu mythos. Inviting comparison to Moore’s renowned comic Watchmen, treating Lovecraftian cosmic horror to the same critique the former did for the superhero genre, Moore wrestles with the legacy of US cosmic horror throughout popular culture, making some interesting points as well as becoming buried in inertia and shock value. As a follow-up and prequel to Moore’s previous Lovecraftian comic Neonomicon, a work that I found had some questionable analysis, I was intrigued enough to dig into it in spite of my reservations. However, in the end, it lost me, with the “cultists are actually right” storyline feeling all too trite. 

At first, the series drew me in with its historical setting and intricate, realist art, promising a thought-provoking and detailed pastiche of Lovecraftian themes. Continuing in collaboration with artist Jacen Burrows, Moore’s talents in directing an almost cinematic pictorial experience make even the most verbose, static sections of the graphic novel flow. Burrow’s work complements the source material with his exquisitely detailed architectural and period work, coupled with humans who just always seem to be not quite alive. This unnerving aesthetic works well with the eerie themes of the graphic novel. 

Taking us back to 1919, we follow the closeted gay New York journalist Robert Black, who is also hiding his Jewish heritage, as he embarks on a tour of New England hoping to track down an ancient book of mysterious arcane lore he’d heard about from a certain chronically ill Spanish doctor he’d talked to as part of a story. Hoping to consult the book as background material for his own book on the secret myths of the United States, Black travels to Salem and Athol, MA, to Manchester, NH, Boston to Providence, RI, at each stop encountering various characters mentioned in Lovecraft stories before running into the “old gentleman” himself. Each chapter in the series plays with a Lovecraft story, introducing Black as an outside observer to the events of, say, The Horror at Red Hook, The Dunwich Horror, The Thing on the Doorstep, or Pickman’s Model, to name just a few. At the same time, nestling these horrific tales into interesting and less well-known historical events such as the 1919 Actors' Equity Association strike and the Boston Police Strike serves to ground these tales into the material reality of the time.  

At the end of each chapter, Moore includes an excerpt from Black’s Commonplace Book, his diary in which he composes his writing notes, which serves mostly to recap the events of the last comic and illustrate what a tedious prose writer Moore is. Whatever interesting ideas that are posed (ghouls and organized labor, for instance) are drowned out in repetitive walls of text, adding little except recapping the chapter’s subtext. Along with the copious references and easter eggs to various weird tales and weird tale writers throughout the century, these entries can make much of the body of Providence begin to drag.     

As a whole, while it’s a very interesting choice to explore the sexual, social, and racial tensions that undergird Lovecraft’s writing, I find Moore’s argument here to be spurious. As mentioned by Moore in an interview, in Neonomicon his goal was to “put the sex back in” to “the sexually squeamish” Lovecraft’s work, which continues to be a theme in Providence. Serving as a stand-in for the various gay and/or Jewish people close to Lovecraft during his life (Robert Bloch, Robert Barlow, Samuel Loveman, Hart Crane, Sonia Greene), Black is an ideal conduit to challenge Lovecraft’s latent antisemitism and homophobia. Well, if he actually challenged anything, at least. 

As noted by Moore in the words of Wizard Whately stand in Warlock Wheatley, Lovecraft’s brand of cosmic nihilism seems at odds with his virulent xenophobia and hatred of other humans when everyone is just equally insignificant compared to the infinity of deep time, but in terms of the way the narrative frames the actions of these cultists and ne’er do wells, we have to conclude that, in a way, they are correct in their assumptions. 

For a work attempting to deconstruct the Cthulhu Mythos and explore its role in shaping contemporary US popular culture, Providence plays the tropes of Lovecraft’s tales remarkably straight (pun not intended). As Black meets with various Lovecraftian characters, he finds that many of them are queer themselves (Herbert West, Detective Malone, Charles Dexter Ward, among others), though this does not change their generally odious actions. Containing one of the most unpleasant and degrading scenes of sexual violence in any of Moore’s pieces (which is saying something), in general, the cultists and otherworldly beings Black meets behave just as Lovecraft depicted them, illustrating what was only inferred. Like Neonomicon, the rampant racism, misogyny, and homophobia of the characters are mostly unremarked upon. It seems Moore favors the “light is the best disinfectant” style of subversion, taking pleasure in showing just how awful the ramifications of Lovecraft’s stories and attitudes are. I’m not sure that it works in this case, though. For me, at least, this focus on Lovecraft’s sexual hangups was a mere distraction from his extreme racism and xenophobia- as though being asexual or repressed in his sexual attraction caused Lovecraft to react with hatred towards all non-Anglo Saxons. I, for one, am not convinced that the racism of the US stems from any latent societal sexual repression, and this amounts to a deep acephobic undertone.   

We’re not meant to witness the scene of underage mind swapping rape in Act 5 and think it’s good, for instance, but what place does it serve in the narrative? The debatable “if we’re going to have a serious, mature exploration of this work, we’re gonna have to include graphic sexual violence” argument notwithstanding, it illustrates that gross misogyny and abuse will take you far. True enough, I guess? These points are certainly well made, but carry with them a major risk as well, that of taking these influences at their word and making the antagonists appear right, and I feel that is what happens by the end of Providence. Framing the xenophobic Lovecraft as being correct, that shifty foreigners and degenerate sexual deviants seek the destruction of the world, in particular. 

As poor Black is led around from one Lovecraft reference to another, becoming increasingly unhinged and traumatized, he only gets one consensual sexual experience, and that ends up spelling his doom and that of humanity, as well. Black discovers that he himself is an occult Herald meant to provide Lovecraft (the true Wilbur Whately) with the raw material to create his most influential stories. As the chosen one meant to “clear off the Earth for the coming of the Great Old Ones,” Lovecraft in effect compiles Black’s experiences into his strongest works, creating a fandom or a cult (same thing) that, returning to the characters from Neonomicon, triumph in the end. Our fascist serial killers and immortal rapists stand alone as the human populace goes mad or dies horribly. Well, I guess that’s as good a metaphor for the state of the world as any. 

For whatever insightful and thought-provoking points Moore makes about race and sexuality in Lovecraft’s work, though, by Providence’s apocalyptic conclusion, he only reinforces the general points of Lovecraft’s cosmic horror that sexual and ethnic diversity only bring madness and pain to the world. While that’s definitely not Moore’s point, the general misanthropy throughout Providence and Moore’s taking Lovecraft’s work completely at face value makes me feel it is not effective at expressing a solid conclusion. Many works have been published recently that take Lovecraft’s reactionary tendencies to task while exploring what gives his stories staying power in a much more coherent and affirming way, but given Moore’s well known penchant for lack of engagement with contemporary pop culture, he probably isn’t aware of them. This, in the end, makes the general atmosphere of Providence feel really outdated, making points that have already been made better by others. 

I discuss my feelings on Moore's other works in genre deconstruction at https://spoonbridge.medium.com/deconstructing-alan-moores-deconstructions-600c73ffe750, Harris Tome Corner, here.