Moore's first volume of Providence is shockingly mediocre. 
 I mean, the premise is good. City reporter learns about a secret USA and walks behind the scenes of a series of Lovecraft stories. So, in these four issues we get "Cool Air" (#1) , "The Horror at Red Hook" (#2), "The Shadow over Innsmouth" (#3), and "The Dunwich Horror" (#4). 
 But, Moore doesn't really do anything interesting with the premise. He twists names and places, to hint that these are the "real" things that Lovecraft then made into fiction. But, there's no deconstruction, and no real variation other than the names. Beyond that, we essentially get cameos: no prequels, sequels, or behind-the-scenes stories that reflect upon the originals in an interesting way. 
 Worse, Moore weighs these stories down with pages of dull textual supplements in every issue. Most of them are the protagonist's views of the story we just read. Again, there's nothing interesting in this different viewpoint of the story. A horrible, hard-to-read handwriting font makes them all the worse. (I realized that I was happier not reading them after I set issue #3 aside for days because I couldn't bear to read the text at the end. I think the fact that it took a full week for me to read these four issues says it all.) 
 The best thing I can say about the volume is that Moore's Lovecraftian knowledge is clear and the art is quite attractive in a clean, pragmatic way. 
 If I hadn't already bought the other two volumes, so that I could read them all back-to-back, I'd probably stop here.