Crossover Cover: Red, White and Blood

The third, and to date final, Nathaniel Cade novel. In this one, Cade and Zach attempt to prevent the parasitic creature known as the Boogeyman from murdering the president. Among the items in Cade’s trophy room are the leg of a cockroach roughly the same size as a human arm, hung on the wall with a plaque reading Operative Samsa, W. Berlin, 1948; a gallon jar filled with formaldehyde holding an insect claw labeled Delambre Remains, 1958; and the dried-out husk of a six-foot-tall praying mantis marked Judas Breed, Adult Stage, New York, 1997. The cockroach arm comes from Gregor Samsa, the protagonist of Franz Kafka's story "The Metamorphosis." The Delambre remains are a reference to the 1958 film The Fly, based on George Langelaan's short story of the same name. The Judas Breed is from Guillermo del Toro's 1997 film Mimic, which was very loosely based on Donald A. Wollheim's story. Tim Lebbon's Hellboy novel Unnatural Selection implied that Hellboy was involved in the events of Mimic. Perhaps he and Cade worked together to resolve the situation. The Whateley farm appears in a flashback, which also mentions Aleister Crowley’s conjuring of a moonchild, the bloody proof of which is all over Whitechapel. The Whateley farm is from Lovecraft's "The Dunwich Horror," while the moonchild is a reference to Aleister Crowley's novel of the same name. One of the characters in The Moonchild, Simon Iff, also appears in a series of detective stories by Crowley. The Whitechapel reference implies that this moonchild is Jack the Ripper. Since the origins of the Redjac entity have never been explained, this take on the Ripper could be considered valid for the CU.  Among the places where the Boogeyman is reported or confirmed to have been encountered are Fairvale, CA; Camp Crystal Lake, NJ; and Springwood, IL. Fairvale is from Robert Bloch's novel Psycho and Alfred Hitchcock's film adaptation. Camp Crystal Lake is from the Friday the 13th film series. Springwood is from the A Nightmare on Elm Street films. The implication is that the Boogeyman influenced Norman Bates, Jason Voorhees, and Freddy Krueger, at least in their initial killings.

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: 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.

Crossover Cover: Hellboy: Unnatural Selection

This Hellboy novel has references to the monster-fighting demon's involvement in the events of three horror movies. One is "something to do with pods" in 1978, a reference to the first remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The remake is very different in its particulars from the original, though a few character names are at least partially retained: Miles Bennell becomes Matthew Bennell, Becky Driscoll is Elizabeth Driscoll, and Jack Bellicec is a main character in both. Presumably the makers of the second film gave the actual people involved the names of characters from the previous one in order to create the illusion that it was a re-imagining of the original story rather than a sequel. (It's also worth noting that Kevin McCarthy has a cameo in the remake where he appears to be playing Miles Bennell, trying to convince people of the invasion as he was at the end of the original.) Another incident was "a shark thing" in 1975, a reference to the film version of Jaws. A third episode was more recent, and involved giant insects that mimic human beings in New York, a reference to the movie Mimic, which was very loosely based on Donald A. Wollheim's 1950 short story of the same name. According to Christopher Farnsworth's The President's Vampire, the title character, vampire secret agent Nathaniel Cade, helped resolve the original Body Snatchers crisis. In the following book, Red, White and Blood, it is implied that Cade was involved in the events of Mimic. Perhaps he worked with Hellboy to help defeat the Judas Breed insects, though Guillermo del Toro evidently omitted their involvement in the incident from his retelling. It's also worth noting that Farnsworth's website formerly boasted a timeline for Cade's universe, which included an entry for the birth of Hellboy, who was not referred to by name.