Crossover of the Week

Winter 1925

THE CREEPING CRAWLERS OF CLAVERING 

Charles St. Cyprian, the Royal Occultist, and his assistant Ebe Gallowglass are summoned to Clavering Grange by Philip Wendy-Smythe. St. Cyprian carried his fair share of bags when he’d played batman for Carnacki. The Sign of Koth is marked on the billiards room door in jam. Wendy-Smythe has one of Vance’s monographs on elementals and has just completed the first English translation of The Book of Minor Grotesques. St. Cyprian says he’ll resolve matters in two shakes of a Shadmock’s tail and mentions the time a dog got into the Drones. He also traces the sign of Hloh in the air and takes the Voorish Sign out of a box decorated in Hyperborean iconography. The sound of rodents reminds Gallowglass of Exham Priory. 

Short story by Josh Reynolds in Shadmocks & Shivers: New Stories Inspired by the Stories of R. Chetwynd-Hayes, Dave Brzeski, ed., Shadow Publishing, 2019. Clavering Grange is the setting of a series of books and stories by R. Chetwynd-Hayes. Thomas Carnacki is from William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder. The Sign of Koth is from H. P. Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.” Vance is Alice and Claude Askew’s occult investigator Aylmer Vance. The Book of Minor Grotesques is a recurring tome in Reynolds’ fiction. The Shadmock is from Chetwynd-Hayes’ eponymous story in the linked collection The Monster Club. The Drones Club is from the works of P. G. Wodehouse. Hloh is from Margery Lawrence’s Miles Pennoyer stories. The Voorish Sign is from Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror.” Hyperborea is from the fiction of Clark Ashton Smith. Exham Priory is from Lovecraft’s “The Rats in the Walls.” Since the Clavering Grange stories are in the CU, so are Chetwynd-Hayes’ tales of psychic detective Francis St. Clare and his sidekick Frederica Masters, who visited Clavering in “The Cringing Couple of Clavering.”

This crossover writeup is one of hundreds included in my book Crossovers Expanded: A Secret Chronology of the World Volume 3, which will be published by Meteor House! All three volumes are AUTHORIZED companions to Win Scott Eckert's Crossovers: A Secret Chronology of the World Volumes 1 and 2!