By Shantell Powell
Content Warning: sexual violence, harm to children, racism, eugenics, homophobia, misogyny
Providence was written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Jacen Burrows. It was first released as a monthly/bimonthly comic book series in 2015 and was rereleased in July 2021 in compendium form. Alan Moore is famous for such graphic novels and comic books as The Watchmen, Swamp Thing, and V for Vendetta. Providence is his final foray into comic books, and what a swan song it is. The back cover blurb declares Providence to be the Watchmen of horror, and I agree with that assessment. I believe this graphic novel will become a classic of literary horror.
Alan Moore is a ceremonial magician, and his nuanced knowledge of the occult is on full display in Providence. He is also a filmmaker, and his visual direction is cinematic and specific. Jacen Burrows’s crisp, clean illustrations are crucial to the magical realism of the setting. Kurt Hathaway’s lettering is put to good use: Providence is in epistolary form and contains pages and pages of dense, handwritten text. Juan Rodriguez did the colour work, and his sombre palette adds to the unease of the book. The story plays with a lot of tropes (cursed books, creepy cultists, ancient evils, descent into madness, breaking the third wall), and does so with surgical precision.
The story takes place in New England not long after World War I, but it does not remain stuck in time or place. The protagonist is Robert Black—a queer Jewish reporter whose ex-lover has just died unexpectedly. Shaken by the death, Black takes a sabbatical from his job at the newspaper. He is researching an urban legend about a book called Sous Le Monde. Supposedly, anyone who reads the book ends up dead. He is intrigued by this and thinks researching the story will inspire him to write a novel. His research takes him throughout rural New England where he meets Howard Phillips Lovecraft and experiences increasingly unsettling events.
In case you are unfamiliar, Lovecraft was an extremely influential horror writer. His sense of horror was on a cosmic scale but was influenced heavily by his xenophobia and ideals of racial purity. Providence is a metafictional Lovecraftian story containing Lovecraft himself. Over the past decade, his fictional entity Cthulhu has become a kitschy part of pop culture, inspiring bobblehead and kawaii incarnations.
Providence strips away all the kitsch to reveal just how disturbing and terrifying the Cthulhu mythos actually is, and just how dehumanizing things like eugenics, class warfare, and homophobia are. If you would like to revisit the Cthulhu mythos with fresh eyes, you need to read this. But be warned—you may want a brain-bleach chaser.