Your favorite mainstream horror books?

[Revenant]

It would have to be a tie between "The Amityville Horror" (scared the pants off me as a teenager) and "Interview With the Vampire". While Ann Rice's works seriously started to devolve after "Lestat," I very much admired the beauty of her descriptive prose in those two works.

[Michael]

Justin Cronin's trilogy

[Gnosticangel]

Another one, though it first entered the "mainstream" in 1933.

Authored by Guy Endore, "The Werewolf of Paris" is "a violent horror story set during the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune and inspired by the work of Hanns Heinz Ewers." It scared me to death when I read it as a teenager in the 1970s.

The Werewolf of Paris: Guy Endore, S. Guy Endore: 9780806512877: Amazon.com: Books

 

The Werewolf of Paris: Guy Endore, S. Guy Endore: 9780806512877: Amazon.com: Books

[Stu]

John Connolly still tends to view himself mainly as a mystery writer; although he admits his definition of mystery is broader than most of his colleagues, allowing as it does for supernatural and metaphysical aspects. His latest short story collection Night Music is mainly horror (along with a few fantasy stories) and features a witty essay on the horror fiction he read in his formative years. Kind of a mini-version of King's Danse Macabre but about fifty times funnier. Among the classics -- Dracula, Frankenstein, Jekyll and Hyde, etc -- he mentions some more mainstream stuff such as Stephen King, The Pan Books of Horror, and Hammer Horror novelizations. Quite a few mentions of British TV horror as well: A Ghost Story for Christmas, Children of the Stones, Dr Who, Sapphire & Steel etc.

[Pharpetron]

Would Matheson's I Am Legend count as mainstream? Clive Barker's The Damnation Game?

Strangely, the books that first come to my mind when thinking of mainstream horror aren't really horror, at least not in the supernatural sense: The Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal. The latter was, in spite of its many, many flaws, easily the most disturbing thing I'd ever read. No other 'decadent' novel has succeeded so brilliantly at implicating its reader in its perversities.

[Robert Adam Gilmour]

In the opening post I did make a guideline for the sort of mainstream I was meaning, which doesn't mean the writers are actually popular but just that they have a mainstream sensibility, usually owe something to the horror novel boom of the 70s and Cemetery Dance would probably publish them.

If people want to take it in a different direction, that's fine but I made this thread in hope of finding the best of a type of horror I usually don't look to. Perhaps this style is dying out or are these guys doing well on ebook?
Since this type of horror relies heavily on big fat novels, it's all the harder to find the good ones.

[Robert Adam Gilmour]

I'm sure I could buy a whole loads of books by the authors listed in the first post and give up early on most of them. One characteristic of these waves of writers is how their work resembles a dominant form of American horror movies.

[DarkView]

Clive Barker's short stories in Books of Blood. I read some Koontz and King as a teen. Both are cheap thrills even for an adolescent, and King's most effective stories were when he channeled Lovecraft; "Graveyard Shift" and "Crouch End" being a couple examples.

[Mr. Veech]

I know it's not technically "horror," but I think Stephen King's The Gunslinger is a fantastic piece of literature. King can write with the best of them when he wants to.

[Pharpetron]

Quote Originally Posted by Mr. Veech

I know it's not technically "horror," but I think Stephen King's The Gunslinger is a fantastic piece of literature. King can write with the best of them when he wants to.

I was actually kind of blown away by The Gunslinger. In it, King shows a loving attention to rhythm and to the texture of the prose that is completely uncharacteristic of him. You can tell that he worked really, really hard on The Gunslinger.