Big spoiler:
At the end of the book, after everything had been tied up and dealt with, the main character got a knock on her door. When she opened it, someone blew her away with a gun. I honestly don’t even remember the details anymore, but it was such as shocking and uncalled-for ending that it just made me angry. It’s not typical of Masterton’s books, and I don’t know why he chose to do it in this case.
If you like Stephen King, you might like his son Joe Hill. I kind of like F. Paul Wilson as well.
Well, Barker would have been my recommendation, but that’s been well supported so far.
My tastes in horror tend to run to comedy/horror, dark fantasy, satiric horror, and occasionally well written parodies.
So, keeping that in mind, you might want to browse a collection of Neil Gaiman’s dark fantasy. For comedy/horror I find much of Christopher Moore’s works to be incredibly funny, with moments of incredible darkness (although the ratio varies greatly from book to book).
In the horror/Satire/homage category, I’d like to mention Anno Dracula, which posits a world in which Bram Stoker’s Dracula was not defeated and in which he brings vampires into the mainstream in England. It involves all the characters of that periods fiction and weaves it into quite the story. While the sequels were less impressive, I still think it would be a fun read.
One of my favorite books in the genre is (IMHO) one of King’s best, and that is Needful Things. I love it compared to most works in the genre because so much of the evil is just people being people, which elevates it far beyond most horror stories that rely on the tropes of the field.
Lastly a couple of movies not mentioned in the thread yet, but I am a massive geeky fan of Angel Heart and while I know little about the novel it’s based on, figure it’s worth a watch in your search for entertainment!
Two recent ones I greatly enjoyed were Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and John Langan’s The Fisherman. The former starts out as a fairly standard gothic haunted place, entrapped heroine sort of novel, but then evolves into something that blends the weird with themes of colonial exploitation, eugenics and classism, while the latter has two widowers going fishing and ends up in the cosmic. Both aren’t without their issues—the story framing of The Fisherman sometimes sits oddly askew, time-wise, while the deliberate pace of Mexican Gothic can sometimes drag a little—but on the whole, they’re the ones that stood out the most for me.
going back aways, I’d recommend h. p. lovecraft “cthulhu”, an early horror writer
I like Joe Hill’s work quite a lot, better than his father’s recent output mto tell the unvarnished truth.
I’ve read Falling Angel, by William Hjortsberg, the book that Angel Heart is based on. It’s very good in my estimation, with an atmosphere of queasy dread and doom about it that the movie tried to capture but couldn’t quite equal.
+1 for The Fisherman. That and Christopher Buehlman’s Between Two Fires (road-trip novel through black-plague era France) are my two favorite horror novels of the last 5 years or so.
Thanks, I’ve always been curious and I see that it’s available these days in a kindle edition! Perhaps I’ll treat myself to a copy once I’ve gotten through the ‘stack’ my last Kindle binge built up. 
As far as novels go, I strongly recommend Kathe Koja’s The Cipher. It’s as nasty and brutal a work as I’ve ever read, but one that’s intimately concerned with human beings, their failures and capacity for endurance, and the morality of despair. It is not at all an insubstantial piece of splatterpunk. It’s like Thomas Ligotti if he dropped the purple prose and abstract characters and focused instead on the miserable moral jetsam of the urban sprawl.
My main thing is horror/weird fic anthologies though, so if you’re at all interested in short story collections…
North American Lake Monsters by Nathan Ballingrud
Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado
Furnace by Livia Llewellyn
The Wide Carnivorous Sky by John Langan
Edit: I’m actually not seeing anyone discussing Ligotti above, so I’ll add him in as well - Penguin did a Classics edition combining Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe, which are very worthwhile collections. So is Teatro Grotesco.
I liked that one a lot, too! I didn’t know it was based on a book. I might search it out.
I’ve also read Mexican Gothic but it had overtones of romance novel that put me off it a bit. I agree that it needed better pacing. But not really that bad.
Have you read Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer? I didn’t find it terribly scary but still really enjoyed it. Very modern lovecraftian.
I would love to know your specific book recommendations for Bentley Little.
I read The Mailman and it was pretty good, but not a very interesting ending.
I read The Ignored and wow, by the end I actually thought, “This kind of sucked.”
I’m reading that right now. Glad to see it recommended.
I think I had the opposite problem that many folks had. The first two thirds or so were a delicious slow building of dread. Once the evil was revealed in the final third of the book, though, it became much more pedestrian and predictable. I’ve had that experience with other books by her, where she does great buildup but doesn’t really stick the landing.
Oh, I think you should by all means. It’s everything–creepy, violent and suspenseful whether you saw the movie or not, and it goes into a lot of interesting stuff about different subcultures that were around in the time and place it depicts. In case you couldn’t tell, I really liked Falling Angel.
University was the first novel by Mr. Little that I ever read, and I thought it was real good. Some of his others, meh, not so much. He does have a better hand with short stories than novels, I must say.
Oh, good. I’m looking forward to it!
Have you tried any of Abby Howard’s stuff? The Last Halloween is fun but on hiatus for a long time while she works on Scarlet Hollow. However, there’s some anthology and short story stuff on the site, and The Crossroads at Midnight looks interesting.
Wow. This thread’s certainly turned up a lot of good recommendations, with some authors and titles I hadn’t heard of, and I’ll be looking into all of them that I can find. Several days of treasure hunting at local libraries and several weeks of interesting horrific reads are in my near future, and I thank you all, from the bottom of my evil little heart, for your suggestions that have opened these possibilities to me.
EDIT: typos