Stephen Case: you have presented the best & most coherent argument for the "Silk commits suicide theory" I have ever encountered -- others may have expressed it before, but if they did it well enough for me to understand, I must have missed it (which is quite possible; I skim a lot of email when I'm busy).
I'm about a third through rereading RTTW now & will watch this carefully.
BTW, I'm afraid I have to back down on my support for the theory that Horn leaves the Silk body at the end of OBW. The process of Horn's receding and Silk's emerging may begin there, but it's a gradual process: when Horn and Hide first astrally travel together to Green, Hide remarks that the Narrator looks a lot more like Horn than he does in Blanko. When they travel together to Urth in IGJ, he says that the resemblance is markedly less.
they're crawling on me