Providence, Act One Review (Alan Moore, Jacen Burrows)

Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows reunite to follow-up their Lovecraftian horror comic, Neonomicon, with a prequel of sorts: Providence - and it’s not half bad! 

Set in 1919 New England, journalist Robert Black decides to write about a supposedly cursed book, Sous Le Monde (“Under the World”), which seems to kill everyone it comes in contact with. Black’s research sends him on a trail into the blighted netherworlds of the unspeakable darkness…, y’know, HP Lovecraft stuff! 

You’ll definitely enjoy Providence a lot more if you’re familiar with Lovecraft’s work - like Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series, there’s an abundance of literary references peppered throughout the book. Also like LXG, Moore skilfully intertwines fiction and reality, from giving you a flavour of the political climate of the time with all the talk of Prohibition to working in a real book, Robert W. Chambers’ The King in Yellow, alongside the made-up Sous Le Monde and the obviously Lovecraft-inspired supporting cast. 

The story isn’t as focused as I’d like and Moore’s certainly in no hurry to tell it either. There was a bit too much dialogue from each new character introduced, most of which didn’t feel very relevant and was irritatingly hard to decipher as Moore writes them in accent (I hate when writers do that). There are also a number of prose pages included here that I just skipped entirely, partly because I picked this up to read a comic and not a novel, and because I’d read Moore’s prose years before in The Black Dossier and it wasn’t worth it - I don’t rate him at all as a prose writer. 

But there was enough to Black’s blighted odyssey, taking in strange small towns full of fishy-looking folk and troubled outcasts living in the middle of nowhere that was compelling. (It also reminded me a lot of Arturo Perez-Reverte’s excellent novel, The Club Dumas, which was later filmed as The Ninth Gate, directed by Roman Polanski and starring Johnny Depp - I highly recommend both.) 

Moore suffuses the book with a suitably disturbing and menacing atmosphere, throwing in unnerving horror sequences and harrowing nightmares (or are they?) at just the right moments to keep you interested. And I like how there’s important visual stuff going on in the background, besides the dialogue, to focus on. Jacen Burrows’ art is always first class but he excels here, vividly bringing to life early 20th century America with a keen eye for detail. 

Like most of Alan Moore’s latter-day comics, Providence, Act One is too wordy and self-consciously literary for its own good but it’s an enjoyably creepy read that’s worth a look if you like horror/weird fiction, and of course if you’re a Lovecraft fan. I didn’t love it but I’m more intrigued than I expected and will continue reading this series.