This collection
of stories featuring Professor Challenger has a few crossovers. In "The
Kew Growths," Challenger and Edward Malone join forces with Thomas
Carnacki to combat the menace of giant fungi that threaten to overrun England.
Carnacki tells Malone that the fungi originated millennia ago on the high
plains of Leng, and that he found a fragment of a chant hidden in The
Concordances of the Red Serpent which alluded to manipulation and control
of their sporulation process. Thomas Carnacki is from William Hope Hodgson’s
short story collection Carnacki the Ghost-Finder. Leng is from H.P.
Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos tales. The Concordances of the Red Serpent is
from Meikle’s novel of the same name. In "The Petrified Forest,"
Challenger and Malone encounter winged, five-pointed, barrel-shaped creatures
that drain life from other beings and chant "Tekeli-Li!" The
creatures are the Elder Things, which appear in a few Mythos tales, notably At
the Mountains of Madness. In "Drums in the Deep," Challenger and
Malone encounter a group of fish-men who chant the name Dagon. These are the
Deep Ones from Lovecraft's "The Shadow over Innsmouth." In "The
Cornish Owlman," Challenger, Malone, and Carnacki battle a supernatural
owl-like creature in Cornwall. In "The Valley of the Lost,"
Challenger and Malone explore a plateau in Big Hole Valley, Montana, which is
inhabited by creatures from the last Ice Age, an old blind man called the
Pastor who came there on a gold-hunting expedition in the 1870s, and a race of
hairy wee folk. The plateau, the Pastor, and the wee folk are from Meikle’s
novel The Valley. In "Parting the Veil," it is mentioned that
Malone learned about the concept of Faraday cages from one of Carnacki's dinner
stories.
I always tend to think the Poison Belt, the second story Doyle wrote about the character, would be considered an AU. The events seem to big for the world outside your window. Of course, if the Martian Invasion could happen, maybe that did too.
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