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H.P. Lovecraft Mystery Cache

Hidden : 10/3/2013
Difficulty:
3.5 out of 5
Terrain:
3 out of 5

Size: Size:   small (small)

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Geocache Description:

The cache is not located at the above coordinates! To discover the location you must research dusty, forbidden tomes (or alternately, the Internet). No night caching!



"Lovecraft opened the way for me, as he had done for others before me - Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber, and Ray Bradbury among them. The reader would do well to remember that it is his shadow, so long and gaunt, and his eyes, so dark and puritanical, which overlie almost all of the important horror fiction that has come since." - Stephen King

H.P. Lovecraft was a noted author of weird fiction (a subgenre of speculative fiction from the late 19th and early 20th century which portrays tales of the macabre). Much of this work consisted of short fiction published in pulp magazines of his era. Some of his most recognizable writing includes "The Call of Cthulhu", At The Mountains of Madness and The Shadow Out of Time. His life and career were relatively short, yet the influence of his work has only grown in time.

The cache is located at the coordinates: N 41 3A.BCD, W 080 08.EFG

To determine the missing information you must find the answers to each lettered question.

HIS LIFE

Howard Philips Lovecraft was born on August 20, 1890 in Rhode Island. Though he would live in places such as New York during his lifetime, Lovecraft always had a strong connection to New England and the majority of his stories are set in real and fictional locales there. Lovecraft would eventually return to live in the city of his birth until his death. He is buried there with his parents on the family plot, though fans would later buy him a tombstone of his own.

The number of letters in the name of this city - 1 = A

Lovecraft started writing at a young age, and was writing poetry as early as age 6. However, his first commercially published work did not come until he was 29 when one of his short stories was published in The Vagrant. This work would be republished in Weird Tales in 1923.

The number of letters in the name of this story - 5 = B

Lovecraft was not a well-known author during his lifetime, though he readily corresponded with other practioners of his craft including Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Bloch and August Derleth. He prefered to communicate via letters and is thought to have penned 30,000 during his lifetime, which places him behind only Voltaire in that distinction.

Because his fiction writing was not commercially lucrative, Lovecraft engaged in ghost writing for a variety of people. One such assignment was to pen the adventures of an early 20th century celebrity during their vacation in Egypt, entitled "Under the Pyramids". Lovecraft did not believe the accounts of this individual's encounter with a real life, Sphinx-like deity, but he needed the money so he accepted the assignment. The celebrity was so impressed with Lovecraft's work he had him do the majority of his ghost writing until his death and sent him an autographed copy of his own book as extra thanks.

The number of letters in the celebrity's last name - 1 = C

In 1936, Lovecraft was diagnosed with cancer of his small intenstine around the same time he lost his friend author Robert E. Howard ("Conan the Barbarian") to suicide. Despite being in constant pain, Lovecraft continued to write including a journal of his illness. He would die the following year on March 15.

Lovecraft's age at death - 42 = D

HIS LEGACY

H.P. Lovecraft became an influence for horror and fantasy writers such as Stephen King, Ramsey Cambbell, Alan Moore, Brian Lumley and Neil Gaiman, film directors such as John Carpenter and artists such as H.R. Giger.

Lovecraft's influence would even stretch to music where a Grammy Award-winning band would pay homage to his works with the songs "The Call of Ktulu" and "The Thing That Should Not Be".

The number of letters in the name of this band - 9 = E

Lovecraft introduced a number of fictional creations. The most famous is the dreaded grimoire penned by the "Mad Arab" Abdul Alhazred. This book has been used in so many stories and movies over the years, some people believe it to be real. While that is not the case, pranksters have managed to sneak it into card catalogues at times including the Yale University library. What is the Dewey Decimal Classification for a book of the dead?
 
The number of letters in the book's name - 5 = F
 
Lovecraft set many of his stories in a blend of real and fictional locations. These sites are popularly known as "Lovecraft Country", and include Miskatonic University and several fictional Massachusetts communities. One of these is the home of an asylum by the same name and has been reused by writers over the years as a tip of the hat to Lovecraft. In 1974, Dennis O'Neil adapted the asylum for use in his work and is now known as a frequent residence of the likes of Poison Ivy, Killer Croc and the Joker.
 
The number of letters in the name of the town/asylum +1 =G
 
You now have the information you need to find the final cache location, and hopefully along the way you have learned more about the writer that Joyce Carol Oates called "an incalculable influence on succeeding generations of writers of horror fiction".


Additional Hints (No hints available.)