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Review 2: By Chance or Providence by Becky Cloonan

By Chance or Providence
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

By Chance or Providence is a collection of three short visual stories written as love-letters to mediaeval mythology. They follow the conventions pretty neatly: there are dark woods with monsters, sex and death intertwine and everyone ends up more miserable than an Eastenders Christmas Special.

By far the strongest narrative is the final instalment in the trilogy, Demeter. A woman whose husband is lost in a storm does a deal with the sea to get him back for just a little time – and then lives in perpetual fear of the time when he’ll be snatched away again. The slow shuffling approach of death, like a George Romero zombie or the inevitable return to work after a holiday, hangs over every pane.

Cloonan has two clear storytelling strengths. Her first is pacing. These stories are short – sparse, even – but each development or step is allowed time to breathe, and have an impact on the reader. She achieves this through careful structuring of the whole page, allowing a neat balance and symmetry in the way she tells the story.

Her other clear strength lies in knowing what doesn’t need to be said. The dialogue is minimal, letting the artwork shoulder the majority of the work. There’s also a section of concept art at the end of the book that makes it clear how much of the stories have been drawn up and then cut out. This makes the stories immeasurably stronger – it lets the readers fill in the gaps, immersing you more.

The artwork, though, is far and away the star of the show. It’s an interesting fusion of a fairly Western style with little hints of Manga. This style lets her convey complex emotions from the simple set of a character’s eyebrows, or the pursing of lips. It’s both effective and elegant, like a Dyson hand-dryer done out in mother-of-pearl. There are also just some really neat touches, stylistically – trees twisted to reveal the ghosts haunting a character, branches used to separate panes. These are, in some ways, small touches, but they contribute immeasurably to the whole.

I’ve given this three out of five stars (it would be three-and-a-half, but Goodreads frowns on my natural inclination to ambiguity and half-measures) because I think the writing isn’t completely where it could be. It plays heavily to tropes, which is to be expected, but doesn’t lend a fresh perspective to them particularly, which isn’t. I did enjoy it though, particularly visually, and will definitely be reading more by her – hopefully East Coast Rising, about which I’ve heard really good things.

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