When Darkness Loves Us by Elizabeth Engstrom is actually two short novels: the title piece (a subtly nasty piece of work, concerning a young woman who gets lost in a cave) and its companion, *Beauty Is… *which is both utterly ghastly and totally heartbreaking at the same time – I read the book in the late 1980s, and there are parts of Beauty Is… that I still can’t forget.
For intense short stories, I can’t recommend David Schow highly enough, he’s that damned good. And he’s even got a Web site (which I’m feeling far too lazy to look up and link to for you just now, sorry) where you can read some of his work for free!
John Shirley is best known for his work in the field of science fiction, but he’s written some real effective horror too – try his novel Demons, and the short story collections Black Butterflies and Living Shadows. His story “Cram” made up my mind for me once and for all, on a subject I’d been waffling about for years – I ain’t NEVER taking BART through the goddamn Transbay Tube again, not if I can help it anyway, for as long as I live!
Then there’s Joe R. Lansdale. The man is God, that’s all there is to it. He’s written many, many excellent book and short stories in the realms of both crime and horror.
Finally, if you like reading big, brutal, and breathlessly adrenalinized epics which ride the line between crime-centered horror and horrific crime fic so hard it cuts into the reader’s ass, I give you {the pseudonymous} Mr. Michael Slade. He’s written a series of novels mostly involving two redoubtable Canadian lawmen, Zinc Chandler and Robert LeClerc, whose duties lead them into a vast sprawling interconnected sequence of international bloodbaths that spans decades. Ghoul, Headhunter, Cut Throat, Hangman, Burnt Bones, Bed Of Nails, Crossbones, and Evil Eye – all exciting as hell, all gloriously sadistic, and all over the top. NB: I am so not kidding about the graphic nature of these novels-- they’re ultra-violent and uber-vicious, by turns gross and hilarious and absolutely nightmarish, and so far from politically correct (at either end of the spectrum) that it ain’t even funny. We’re talking about the prose equivalent of thrash metal here, with the volume turned up to 11.