Greg Iles & Lisa Jackson are both great horror writers. They write realistic horror. Jackson is great about writing from the killer's point of view but not letting the reader know the identity of the killer.

I highly recommend both authors.

 

Check out the Pine Deep Trilogy by Jonathan Maberry.

 

Check out Dan Simmons, he's one of my favorites. There's SUMMER OF NIGHT, about kids in a small town battling some crazy things, (it's one of my desert island books), there's a sequel called A WINTER HAUNTING. Then there's THE TERROR, about a large wooden ship stuck in the ice and the men
start to realize they're not alone on the ice. Also check out CARRION COMFORT, it's about these people/beings who can kill with their minds and can live
a long time, and a man who knows about them and tries to kill them. Let me know what you think.

 

Stephen King (der), Robert R. McCammon, Jane Austen, Dean Koontz (sometimes good, sometimes bad), Bruce Campbell (seriously, his books are so funny!), JK Rowling, E.L. James (just kidding lol)

 

I didnt read what you wrote sweetie but I totally agree.

 

A man after my own heart! I'm gonna add Poe to that list..

 

Tj Lord wrote a book called 13 that i really liked it was disturbing and had some cool history in it.

 

Aside from the well-known authors of the genre (King, Koontz, McCammon, Poe, Matheson, Straub, etc), here's some you may not know who write great horror in a variety of styles...

Joe R. Lansdale
Hugh B. Cave
Christopher Fowler
Tim Lebbon
David J. Schow
John Skipp & Craig Spector
S.P. Somtow
Charles L. Grant

 

I own about10 anthologies of Horror and I have read stories written by a good number of the people on your list, they are excellent writers.

 

Suggested Authors

Just thought I would suggest the following as they are amongst my faiv:

Graham Masterton

Richard Laymon

John/Jon Saul

Shaun Hutson

My top two have to be Masterton and Laymon...they are totally awesome and I have almost every book

 

I have just started the "remaining" series by DJ Molles I think there are 4books with a 5th due any time now. A soldier survives the zombie apocalypse In his bunker and sets out to rescue and rebuild society with a rag tag group of other survivors and soldiers. It's very well written and the main protagonist, Lee is very engaging and believable. A true American hero. I highly recommend it.

 

Stephen King wrote a great review of the book The Troop, written by Nick Cutter. I figured if SK loved it, it'd be worth checking out.
I'm about a quarter of the way through it and let me tell you: if you are a fan of SK then this book is for you. It reminds me of From a Buick 8 and Dreamcatcher. I'll be looking for more from this author.

 

[MENTION=7572]meeps[/MENTION] If you like Lovecraft, then you would absolutely LOVE Brian Lumley and his Necroscope series.

The Necroscope Harry Keogh starts out with him as a young boy, who had an ability he never told anyone about. He could talk to the dead. He learned from the dead such as Plato and many others and learned about how to make invisible doors appear only to him, jump through them and out of danger, and appear either behind you, or 2,000 miles away.

Anyway he learns how to fight and destroy vampires. Not the nice bite your neck kinda Vampires let me tell you, but some of the sickest, most perverse sh!te you could ever imagine, with pliable skin that they could transform to look like others, and each with their own psychic abilities. They can pull off pieces of their own flesh,and along with urine, feces, spit, semen, humans, and their "secret sauce" could combine them in giant tubs, stirring them for days until they could shape them into various forms of beasts (such as flyers -my fav- kinda like their own personal dragons that could stretch theirs their skins to pick up humans and than make pouches to store them in.

If you like something that will give you disgust you, make you nauseous, and give you nightmares, then Brain Lumley and his Necroscope series would do the trick. Gads! I wish I could post some of the most disturbing things here, but I think it would get me banned.

He also wrote some books with short stories in them. My fav. being about two boys messing with a mentally disabled man who they shot with rocks and he came up on the bridge and knocked the boys off. One fell into the water and could not see as he swam for the shore, making it he found the shore to be slimy and hot and very diffficult to pull himself up, but he did, cleared the mud from his eyes and found the reason he couldn't get up the bank is due to him slipping and sliding in the guts of his friend who landed on the bank instead of in the water.

And the sexual things he puts in his books may make you become celibate for LIFE.

So give Brian Lumley a try...IF you think you can handle it.

Necroscope
Book 1 Fantastic
Book 2 meh...s'ok
Book 3 Won awards!!
Book 4 awesome.
Book 5 WHAT?! How can you kill the main character NOOOOOOOO!! But a fantastic read.
So many people wrote and cried and DEMANDED the series continue led to some of his greatest work.
The Blood brothers trilogy. To pick a fav. from them isn't possible.
The series continued for a while after that, all of them great.
Then he moved onto his passion for Lovecraft (which he did a great many short stories) and led to his book Cthulhu.
He wrote more, and I never read Cthulhu, the swelling in my brain after 5 yrs affected the optic nerves in the back of my eyes and I lost the ability to read small print. Meh...maybe they'll put it on tape or CD's one day.
(That would prolly make me shite myself hearing it read to me in a dark room O_O )

 

I'll throw my hat into the ring for V.M Zito. It wouldn't be hard to catch up on his back catalogue, he has one novel and a few short stories that expand on it.

His one novel The Return Man is excellant, especially to say it's his first. I'm a big zombie fan but the genre is a bit tired, this is a different take, very character driven and you get emotionally invested the multiple time the character's lives are on the line. Well paced with a nice tone and the occasional gut punch.

In the book all but a few eastern states of the US have fallen to the undead. One man takes out contracts from well off survivors to scour the zombie infested badlands for their loved ones to "return" the dead to the grave and give some closure to those they left behind. He is manipulated into taking a very special contract by a skeevy politician and must trek from his fortified mountain home in Arizona into the heart of California.

 

Don't forget to add James Herbert OBE to the mix of horror writers.