Crossover of the Week

July 1977

VOODOO VS. CTHULHU! 

Adventuress Nefertiti Bronze battles the Esoteric Order of Dagon, who killed her voodoo bocor ex-husband. Montresor Mountmain’s Chapel of Satan in Hell’s Kitchen is the base of one of the rival cults that falls victim to the worshippers of the Esoteric Order. Joseph Curwen, in his current body of Walker Phillip Ward, can turn up unannounced at Sbirro’s, though the restaurant is officially booked solid for years ahead. Curwen is interviewed by Whitney Gauge of the FBI’s Human Protection League, aka the Unnamables. Nefertiti’s grandmother was a seven-foot-tall Waziri princess named Ashanti. Curwen puts out a contract on Nefertiti, but the major assassins all fail, and Don Corrado Prizzi decides to sit things out. Curwen pores over photos of Nefertiti with famous people, including Derek Flint. 

Short story by Kim Newman in The Lovecraft Squad: Dreaming, Pegasus Books, 2018. The Esoteric Order of Dagon is from H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Shadow over Innsmouth.” Montresor Mountmain is a member of the Mountmain family seen in Newman’s “Seven Stars.” Joseph Curwen is from Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. Sbirro’s is from Stanley Ellin’s “The Specialty of the House.” Whitney Gauge first appeared in Newman’s Diogenes Club story “Moon Moon Moon.” The Unnamables first appeared in Newman’s “The Big Fish”; it is revealed here that they are synonymous with the Human Protection League (HPL), the branch of the FBI featured in The Lovecraft Squad books. The Waziri tribe is from the Tarzan novels. Don Corrado Prizzi is from Richard Condon’s series of novels, beginning with Prizzi’s Honor. Derek Flint is from the movies Our Man Flint and In Like Flint. 

This crossover writeup is one of over a thousand appearing in my book Crossovers Expanded: A Secret Chronology of the World Volume 3, coming this summer from Meteor House! All three volumes are AUTHORIZED companions to Win Scott Eckert's Crossovers: A Secret Chronology of the World Volumes 1 and 2!

Crossover Cover: The President's Vampire

In the second Nathaniel Cade novel, Cade and Zach Barrows battle a threat that began in Innsmouth in 1928, and at one point Cade flashes back to his part in the Innsmouth raid. In Cairo, Egypt, Cade meets a man called Flint, who was once “The World’s Greatest Secret Agent,” and in his time handled “plots that never made the news: secret space missions, vanishing islands, strange weapons and deadly assassins with steel teeth.” This is clearly Derek Flint from the movies Our Man Flint and In Like Flint. The implication of the description of the plots that he handled seems to be that some of the James Bond films were distorted accounts of Flint's own cases.Other references include: a series of “vampire murders” in Providence, Rhode Island in 1928, during which Benjamin Franklin’s corpse was stolen (from Lovecraft's "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward"); the “Christmas Invasion” of Kingston Falls, Indiana (from the movie Gremlins); the Pabodie Expedition to the Mountains of Madness (from Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness"); a wave of sleeping deaths in Springwood, Ohio (from the horror film A Nightmare on Elm Street); the horror at Red Hook, New York in 1925 (from Lovecraft's "The Horror at Red Hook"); a mysterious creature that terrorized Dunwich, Massachusetts in 1928 (from Lovecraft's "The Dunwich Horror"); a Gill-Man that escaped into the Everglades after being captured in the Amazon in the 1950s (from The Creature from the Black Lagoon); a 1951 Antarctic expedition, following in the footsteps of the Pabodie expedition, that discovered an alien craft (from the movie The Thing from Another World, which was based on John W. Campbell's story "Who Goes There?," which is already in, but is so different in its plot and characters that both stories could have happened in the CU); the Pod People incident in the 1950s (from the original version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers); and rumors of a shadowy figure that preyed on criminals in the 1930s and ’40s (the Shadow, of course.)

Crossover Cover: Honey West/Captain Action/That Man Flint