Crossover Cover: The Dead Don't Die

This collection of Cal McDonald stories by Steve Niles includes "The Dead Don't Die," in which Cal

puts down a zombie outbreak in the California desert. While commenting on zombies, he mentions “what happened with radiation in Pittsburgh in the late sixties.” The incident in Pittsburgh is clearly meant as a reference to the events of the first Night of the Living Dead film. Although later films in the series (Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, Land of the Dead, Diary of the Dead, and Survival of the Dead) involve the world being overrun with the walking dead, other sources, such as the Return of the Living Dead films and the Nathaniel Cade novels, show this particular incident was actually very isolated. Some hero must have stopped whatever caused the outbreak to spread in other universes.

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.