I’d say The Dead Zone and maybe even Firestarter.
I avoided horror novels for years until a friend pushed those two on me, saying they weren’t really horror at all. Read them, loved them, and he was right. So I asked him for another one, and he lent me 'Salem’s Lot. Bastard.
I second The Dead Zone. IMO this is one of his best.
The Stand isn’t scary per se, but it is kinda creepy in an apocalyptic kind of way.
Goddamn cranberry juice BURNS when you choke on it!
I didn’t really find The Tommyknockers to be particulary frightening. It’s got some viscerally unpleasant moments, but most of it is riffing on 1950’s sci-fi archetypes rather than horror.
*Needful Things ** wasn’t scary. I can’t recommend it in good conscience, though, because it seemed to be trying * very hard to be scary; it just didn’t succeed. It’s like one of the lesser episodes of Rod Serling’s Night Gallery, padded out to a three-hour running time. (Note to Stephen King: the rhyme begins, “*ITSY BITSY * spider.” Not “*Hinky-pinky * spider.” No one in the history of Earth has ever started the water-spout rhyme with “hinky-pinky.” Any chance of *Needful Things ** being scary went out the window the instant you put the phrase “hinky-pinky” in it. The Necronomicon wouldn’t be scary if it had the phrase “hinky-pinky” in it. * “Ph’nglui mglw’nfah Cthulhu R’lyeh hinky-pinky wgah’nagl fhtagn!” See how that works? You just entirely shot yourself in the foot with that one.)
I think that the scariness level of Misery hinges directly on how closely the reader identifies with the protagonist. Weirdly, while Stephen King has in the past been able to persuade my limbic system into believing that being afraid of vampires is absolutely reasonable, this same author couldn’t make the main character of Misery, a famous author, seem quite as real to me as those vampires.
I didn’t find Cycle of The Werewolf all that scary, but that one Berni Wrightson drawing of the werewolf peeling back the sherriff’s cheek was a ongoing image in my nightmares for awhile.
Gerald’s Game.
He did an online project 6-7 years ago where you could download the Plant one chapter at a time (for a ‘donation’), but stopped halfway through.
By the way, a felt and still feel this project was a ripoff.
Ah, I vaguely remember that now. I didn’t have internet access at the time.