Title The Courtyard Author Alan Moore Illustrator Jacen Burrows Publisher Avatar Press - 2009 First Printing Avatar Press - 2003
	Title Neonomicon Author Alan Moore Illustrator Jacen Burrows Publisher Avatar Press - 2011 First Printing Avatar Press - 2011
	Title Providence Act 1 Author Alan Moore Illustrator Jacen Burrows Publisher Avatar Press - 2016 First Printing Avatar Press - 2016
	Title Providence Act 2 Author Alan Moore Illustrator Jacen Burrows Publisher Panini - 2016 First Printing Avatar Press - 2016
	Title Providence 3 Author Alan Moore Illustrator Jacen Burrows Publisher Panini - 2017 First Printing Avatar Press - 2017
	Category Graphic Novel Warnings Nudity, Suicide Main Characters Robert Black, Aldo Sax, Merry Brears, H.P. Lovecraft, and pretty much every character that ever showed up in a Lovecraftian tale Main Elements Lovecraftian Website ---

The Courtyard

Neonomicon

Providence Act 1

Providence Act 2

Providence Act 3

Moore weaves the tales of Lovecraft, Chambers and Poe (and maybe more, Bierce gets a shout out) into an alternate reality where all these worlds of cosmic horror are an integral whole. However don't go into this graphic novel trilogy if you are not VERY familiar with those stories because otherwise it won't make any sense, nothing is explained, the reader is supposed to know all that the protagonist is blissfully oblivious about, to be horrified how he walks naively in and around things of eldritch horror.

So what do you need to read before starting this trilogy? Well, the whole first issue is heavily influced by Robert Chambers The King in Yellow, not just because the play is briefly mentioned, but because it appears to take place in the world of The Repairer of Reputations (that story is wonderfully complex and twisted, highly recommend it, and then look up the Tor.com discussion of it to try to make sense of it). I think without that prerequisite, the first issue will make nearly no sense at all. It sets the world stage, it has the suicide chambers, its pretty key to the setup and its a little while before we even get to H.P. Lovecraft references.

Now our journalist, after the death of his lover, decides to learn more about a book that is not called the Necronomicon but seems very likely one and the same, I mean how many mad Middle Eastern authors are there writing occult books? And Black's first lead can be no other than the refrigerated doctor from Lovecraft's Cool Air.

We then find ouselves in New York, running into the Detective Malone and Suydam from The Horror at Red Hook. Black then follows his lead to what is most certainly Innsmouth but it has a different name, the fishy people are unmistakable though (I loved the bit about the seals...*cough*) His research then takes him to the Whateleys which feature in The Dunwich Horror. After an uncomfortable conversation with them (especially that poor disturbed albino daughter trying to get her giant imaginary son back into the shed...) his next stop will be a university, not called Miskatonic but what else can it be?

Unfortunately my unfamiliarity with Poe prevented me from noting if there was anything overt from his works, other than the characters occasionally mentioning his works.

But it's not just a book about all the creepy things crawling through the minds of early 20th century horror authors, but also a review of the time period itself. See, our protagonist is gay, and while he doesn't have gills or hooves or any of the other interesting things the people he meets up with do (hooves? nah, orthopedic shoes, that's all) he himself is a creature on the outskirts of society, with secrets he cannot share.

At the same time he represents the rest of us, how when presented with something strange and horrific, we find ways to rationalize it, normalize it, brush it off as a "gas leak" or a "dream" or that just a strange physical mutation or mental instability. And yet, the more he is exposed to things, the more he is starting to feel that there might just be something a little bit more to all this strangeness.

Will see who far down the rabbit hole he goes in the second volume...

Alright, a little bit of Google and I discover Moore actually started with The Courtyard and Neonomicon. In the first one, and FBI agent named Aldo Sax is investigating killers with a weirdly similar M.O. and discovers that the world is not what he thought it was as a character named Carcosa whispers strange words into his ear.

While The Courtyard is very short, just brushing the surface of the horror, the Neonomicon goes all out. Unspeakable horrors await the FBI agents trying to figure out what happened to Aldo Sax and why he appeared to have been driven mad. The detectives figure out all the references to Lovecraft, and begin to wonder who inspired who. In fact its our world, they know all the stories and yet...there's something a little off, like in Chambers' Repairer of Reputations. If you pay attention to the art, you'll notice that all the cities are covered in glass domes. Its never mentioned why, but just like the alternate history in Repairer, it gives a disturbing feeling of its our world...but its not. Which maybe should reassure us that Cthullu won't be rising from the depths any time soon.

This is no simple read, there is sex, rape, torture, murder, FBI jerks dropping racist and homophobic terminology, and of course the requisite madness. And they interestingly discuss Lovecraft himself and his quirks (racist, asexual...while turning everything he wrote very very sexual), it really ties all the mythos and reality into an interesting whole. It's got pretty much every trigger warning, even ones that would affect Lovecraft himself.

And I clearly have a few more authors like Bierce I need to catch up on, there were references to things I didn't even notice till the characters pointed them out.

So this book is not for the faint hearted and I can totally see how, well, a large number of people can be offended by it, there are bits of it that weren't necessary (like why does the heroine need to be a sex addict? The jerk FBI agents.) but I'm with one Goodreads reviewer and that the rape scene was in its way well done. It was terrifying, as the heroine didn't have her glasses so everything was blurry, the innane chatter of the other characters as if they do this every day (well, ok they do), but all that just came together to make the horror so much more real, and frankly made the humans the monsters, the monster actually lets the girl go and eats everyone else. So there is a point to it, but it was very very long and very very graphic.

In the second Providence volume, Black has to work really hard to dismiss his experiences as he literally blunders through the various stories written by Lovecraft. Now I had to pick up a French copy of the second book because the library lost the English one, so I wondered why they changed some names like Pitman instead of Pickman. But apparently it is the same in the English version, because as I discovered, we will meet the actual H.P. Lovecraft. Now the question becomes are HPL's stories based in reality, rather than are we in a fictional HPL world. Because it was in French it made me read it a little slower, which made me appreciate it more. We run into Lord Dunsany too, I'm lacking in that area, will have to read some of his work some day, as Providence moves from the more monstrous of HPL's creation to his Dreamlands.

It's really well done, how its woven all the HPL stories together, along with actual history. Black arrives in Boston during a police strike and is told about a molasses factory that exploded and literally drowned people in sticky gunk. I had to Google that but sure enough, it was a thing (and you think a water flood is bad...true 2 million gallons of brown gooey liquid). And of course the queer scene, where those of that inclination would wear a green tie to recognize each other.

After each illustrated section there is a pure text summary from the POV of Black writing in his notebook and you can see how he struggles to explain his experiences, from hallucinations, mesmerisms and nightmares...but he's struggling, not even able to write some of it down, getting harder to convince himself it was just a figment of his imagination.

Well...don't all of HPL's characters go mad in the end? Black is well on his way. Can't blame him, when you body swap with a young girl and then get raped, or you watch a giant rat with a human head suckle at an old woman's breast...how can you not start to question?

I should mention the artwork, its beautiful and extremely detailed, perhaps too much so during certain disturbing scenes. Was staring at the picture of Carver's library, all those books, the Persian carpet, little knicknacks on the shelves, and yes, the cat, love how it leads the pair into Dreamland, I better be careful when I follow my black cat down a set of stairs from now on...

The third album wraps up where The Courtyard and The Neonomicon start. We learn that Black was doing a lot more than just blundering blindly through various Lovecraft tales. And pretty much nobody lives happily ever after. There's so much to dig into in these books, references to Lovecraft, references to people and events of the real world. I'd love to dig into more of it in this review but I think I'm already giving away too much, I'll let you discover on your own how everything unravels.