Thank you for the recs! I'm sure I can go to the library as I don't read ebooks (we all remember "libraries", right? those big building with lots of books?*lol*)

Something that's really awesome - and important = to me is how many people in this fandom are so well-read. Mostly I've been reading nonfiction for the last 20 years so I have huge gaps in a lot of areas. "horror" is a genre that's never appealed to me, so I have to read what other people say about the tropes in btvs early seasons to actually know the tropes exist.

Recommending Lovecraft to novices is a bit tricky, since, well, he wasn't a very good writer.

OT, did you ever read the Celestine Prophecy? that was all the rage among new age types including a lot of my friends back in the '90's, huge best seller - and I could barely get through chapter one. Just give me the freaking ideas and spare me the lousy prose and hackneyed "adventure story" please.

The horror in Lovecraft isn't that you might get eaten, the horror is in that huge gaping chasm between what we think we know and control, and the realisation that we know NOTHING and our entire well-ordered man-on-top philosophy is maddeningly naive...

I remember you mentioned Lovecraft in your comments re: Mabus_101's "(meme)metapsychosis" (the Buffybot story) and that sounds very much in line with what you're saying here. Christ on a crumpet that is the BEST Buffybot story ever.