Wednesday, October 8, 2014

Crossover Cover: Blood Oath

Christopher Farnsworth has done three novels and one novella featuring Nathaniel Cade, America's vampire secret agent, and his sidekick, former White House aide Zack Barrows. All three novels have crossover references. Before I list the references in the first book, Blood Oath, I should note that the President in the Cade books is a white man named Samuel Curtis, rather than Barack Obama, and his VP is corrupt and works with an evil organization called the Shadow Company. Since one of the core tenets of the CU is that it's virtually identical to our world on the surface, this should be considered a distortion for CU purposes, although the Shadow Company is too central to the plots of the Cade books to not be a real organization there. (For the record, discussion of real world politics in any way other than their relation to the CU is OT on this blog.) Cade’s trophy room includes the skull of a Deep One from Innsmouth (from Lovecraft's "The Shadow over Innsmouth"), parts of Brainerd’s Steam Man (from Edward S. Ellis' dime novel story "The Steam Man of the Prairies", a large bright-gold beetle (from Edgar Allan Poe's "The Gold Bug"), wood from the Devil Tree of British Guiana (from Frank Aubrey's novel The Devil-Tree of El Dorado: A Romance of British Guiana), and a mummified monkey’s paw (from W.W. Jacobs' "The Monkey's Paw".) There are several references to the “Teenage Monster” incident in New Jersey (a reference to the events of the film I Was a Teenage Frankenstein) and the “Night of the Living Dead” incident in Pennsylvania (self-explanatory, although in the CU, Romero's film was an exaggeration of a much smaller event, as seen in the film Return of the Living Dead, and the sequels take place in an AU.) A news report about the murder of several camp counselors outside Blairstown, New Jersey by “some bogeyman” is mentioned; there was one survivor. This is a reference to the first Friday the 13th film, which was partly shot in Blairstown. Cade runs up against an old nemesis, the immortal alchemist Johann Konrad Dippel. The immortal St. Germain is mentioned to have visited Teddy Roosevelt at the White House. Dippel and the Count of St. Germain are both historical figures who have appeared in other works set in the CU. I will cover the crossovers in the other two books in the next few days.

4 comments:

  1. I suppose I could argue since there is a different president than the real one, the Nathaniel Cade books are an AU.

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  2. I would argue that fictionalizations of real events and persons are one of the most core tenents of this type of creative mythography, and certainly not in any way a sole basis for treating events as taking place in an AU.

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  3. Yes, that's true. Mostly I'm just playing Devils Advocate. Truth is I haven't read the book so I can't say for certain. If it's not too important to the plot, it probably does not matter if it's a real President or not.

    There are different ways of portraying the President in fiction. Some use fictional ones. The Destroyer series keeps the President unnamed, but unless you are completely ignorant of American politics you can usually figure out which president is which. There is a manga called Golgo 13 about a freelance assassin. The character is noted to have been hired by every American president from Ford on who are called by name and drawn fairly accurately. He has also hired out to other world leaders like Nelson Mandela.

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  4. As something of a fan of the President's Vampire series, I'm glad to see this here, and am particularly looking forward to the future installments (especially of the second book and its revelations about the James Bond movies).

    Also of interest is the timeline posted on Farnsworth's site, which gives exact dates for the stories and weaves several other fictions and bits of conspiracy leend into the background.

    http://www.presidentsvampire.com/chronology/

    There's also an older version with a few differences, including an appearance from Hellboy.

    http://www.presidentsvampire.com/chronology1.html

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