Printable Tire asked Alan Moore:

How extensive was your research on Providence, Rhode Island? Did you find anything in its history of particular interest? Have you ever visited?

Alan Moore Actually, with Providence I found that given the considerable amount of Providence history contained both in Lovecraft’s work and letters, along with the fairly exhaustive studies of Providence in some of the Lovecraft scholarship and biography that I’ve been immersed in, it was the less-immediately-connected places like Athol and Manchester, New Hampshire that demanded the most research. Interestingly, 2015 being the 125th anniversary of Lovecraft’s birth, I was contacted by the Providence town authorities with an incredibly generous offer to sail me into Providence on a tramp steamer and let me look around the place without obligation of public appearances. Not having a passport and thus being relatively geostationary, I had to decline...although in some ways I think that, as with a lot of places, I prefer to keep my own private imaginary Providence intact. For me – and this is no doubt a purely personal quirk of no especial meaning – I’ve found that with historically based projects such as Providence or, for that matter, From Hell, the very best and most satisfying reference tool, after you’ve read all the necessary history and absorbed it, is a simple period map. In issue four, for our visit to the Wheatley/Whateley family, we were able to find a likely local site for their farm on the nearby Cass Meadow, which is encouragingly close to the hill with the Sentinel Elm (which becomes Sentinel Hill for the final scenes of ‘The Dunwich Horror’), and where we were also able to find a farm property without a current owner’s name attached to it, so that the Wheatleys might have lived there back in 1919. We...and when I say ‘we’ I’m mainly talking about me and my invaluable research-henchman Joe Brown...were able to do pretty much the same thing for the visit to Boston coming up in issues seven and eight. The thing is, with a map and an excursive imagination you can almost create a virtual walk-through of the place concerned, only with much better graphics and much better resolution. My extensive visits to Whitechapel during the writing of From Hell, while they gave me access to the atmosphere of the place as it is today, which I found useful in writing the ‘Dance of the Gull-Catchers’ appendix, I don’t think that any of those observations were relevant to the bulk of the story itself. I suppose what this comes down to is that in terms of research methods, I’m a big fan of remote viewing.

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