Book Lust pg 216
While not nearly so prone to serialization (Anne Rice being the most notable exception on this list), Pearl's Horror list is rather vague. She admits freely that she doesn't much like Horror and I imagine that it's a function of that hesitance to read the genre that creates this problem. What she's done is to sort of implicate everything Crichton, Rice, and King have ever written as being worthy of reading which I doubt was the intention. The completest in me is tempted to list everything but say that I'm only committing to the one's she specifically mentions but even so one must limit or this list will be even longer than fantasy. So for Rice - only the vampire chronicles and for King and Crichton only the novels - otherwise I'll never get out of horror. Look for the * after the ones she specifically mentions.
Michael Crichton:
1. Drug of Choice
2. A Case of Need
3. Binary
4. Zero Cool
5. The Androeda Strain
6. The Terminal Man
7. Eaters of the Dead
8. Congo
9. Sphere
10. Jurassic Park*
11. Westworld
12. Rising Sun
13. Disclosure
14. Twister
15. Airframe
16. Timeline
17. Prey
18. State of Fear
Anne Rice:
19. Interview with the Vampire*
20. The Vampire Lestat*
21. The Queen of the Damned
22. The Tale of the Body Thief
23. Memnoch the Devil
24. The Vampire Armand
25. Merrick
26. Blood and Gold
27. Blackwood Farm
28. Blood Canticle
Stephen King:
29. Carrie*
30. Salem's Lot
31. The Shining
32. The Stand*
33. The Dead Zone
34. Firestarter
35. Cujo
36. The Mist
37. Pet Cemetary
38. Christine
39. Cycle of the Werewolves
40. It
41. The Eyes of the Dragon
42. Misery
43. Tommyknockers
44. The Dark Half
45. Needful Things
46. Gerald's Game
47. Dolores Claiborne
48. Insomnia
49. Rose Madder
50. Desperation
51. The Green Mile
52. Bag of Bones
53. Storm of the Century
54. The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
55. Dreamcatcher
56. From a Buick 8
57. The Colorado Kid
58. Cell
59. Lisey's Story
60. The Gunslinger
61. The Drawing of the Three
62. The Waste Lands
63. Wizard and Glass
64. Wolves of the Calla
65. Song of Susannah
66. The Dark Tower
Shirley Jackson:
67. We Have Always Lived in the Castle
68. The Haunting of Hill House
69. Turn of the Screw by Henry James*
70. In a Glass Darkly by Sheridan LeFanu*
71. The White Devil by John Webster*
72. Falling Angel by William Hjortsbergs*
73. Those Who Hunt the Night by Barbara Hambly*
74. I am Legend by Richard Matheson*
75. Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo*
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Robert R. McCammon
1. Baal (demon)
2. Bethany's Sin (curse)
3. The Night Boat (zombie)
4. They Thirst (vampire)
4. Mystery Walk (mythology)
5. Usher's Passing ("sequel" to Poe's story)
6. Swan Song (postapocalyptic) *
7. Stinger (alien) *
8. The Wolf's Hour (werewolf/WWII) *
9. Blue World (short stories)
10. Mine (obsession)
11. Boy's Life (fictional autobiography) *
12. Gone South (Hiaasen-style crime caper)
13. Speaks the Nightbird (witch/historical)
*s are McCammon at his best
10-13 are not horror
Like King, McCammon has written across many subgenres of horror. He often puts some other twist to the story, making the horror angle secondary or at least requiring it to share the story with some other plotline. If you're picking by genre, I put them in parentheses.
Extra note: as an author, he wasn't pleased with Bethany's Sin and has tried to disown it.
Other key horror books/authors i don't see on your list:
F. Paul Wilson in general, The Tomb specifically
V.C. Andrews: Flowers in the Attic
(apparently most of her books are crap and the last 20 or more were ghostwritten after she died, but this, her first, is supposed to be good)
Whitley Streiber: The Hunger
of those, Wilson's the only one i've actually read.
Out of sheer commercial success, Dean Koontz, John Saul, and Brian Lumley should probably be mentioned, but all three have problems.
Koontz and Saul seem to just write throwaway, "read it in an hour" novels, with each having a particular gimmick that appears in most of their books: Koontz tortures women, and Saul kills children.
Lumley is a little different; he seems to want to be the next H.P. Lovecraft, but his prose reads like an unskilled writer trying to emulate Lovecraft, for which there is probably a reason. He writes mostly vampire books, though his vampires are more aggressive/evil and decidely less "sexy" than Rice's.
Also, you forgot or renamed Crichton's The Great Train Robbery
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