Jane Rice was an American writer of science fiction, fantasy, and horror who gained prominence in the early 1940s. She made her fiction debut in July 1940 with the short story "The Dream," published in the influential magazine Unknown under the editorship of John W. Campbell. During World War II, Rice became a frequent contributor to the publication, placing ten stories there. Campbell also purchased her debut novel, Lucy, in 1943, but the manuscript was lost by the publisher after Unknown abruptly ceased operations, and no carbon copy survived.
Despite the loss of her novel, Rice's short fiction in Unknown earned critical acclaim. Her notable works from this period include "The Refugee" (1943), a sensual werewolf tale later selected for Campbell's From Unknown Worlds anthology, and "The Idol of the Flies" (1942), which featured a notoriously malicious child protagonist named Pruitt. Both stories have been widely anthologized in modern collections of classic horror and weird fiction.
Following the war, Rice transitioned to writing for mainstream women's magazines and slick publications such as Colliers and Cosmopolitan. She returned to speculative fiction in the late 1950s with contributions to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and later collaborated with Ruth Allison under the pseudonym Allison Rice. In the 1980s, she wrote mystery stories for Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. Her horror novelette The Sixth Dog was published in 1995, followed posthumously by a comprehensive collection of her short fiction, The Idol of the Flies and Other Stories, in 2003.
