4/11/26

Women In Horror Year: Day 10

The Idol of Flies and Other Stories by Jane Rice

Out Of Print — Available on Secondary Market

Born in Kentucky in 1913, Jane Rice was a writer of horror and fantasy short stories. Her first was published in a 1940 issue of Unknown Worlds. This magazine would go on to publish roughly a third of her work (sort of akin to Lovecraft and Weird Tales). Her stories stood out from those of her peers — influenced by her rural upbringing, and a ruthless sort of prose that would have been right at home with today’s readers. Her most famous short story — a werewolf tale called “The Refugee”, has been widely reprinted in various anthologies over the years, but much of her other work is now out of print. The manuscript for her only known novel, Lucy, was lost by the publisher shortly after World War Two. The sum total of her collected work is the novelette The Sixth Dog (published in 1995) and this collection — The Idol of Flies and Other Stories, edited by Stefan R. Dziemianowicz and Jim Rockhill, and published in hardcover in 2003 by John Pelan’s Midnight House. This book collects twenty-two stories that originally appeared in pulps and magazines, as well as a story that had never been published anywhere. Rice passed away that same year.

I’m hesitant to include a lot of out of print works in this year-long project, but Rice’s work is mostly unknown by several entire generations of readers, and risks falling beyond obscurity into the same fate that claimed her novel. You can find this edition on the secondary market — prices vary wildly from $150 to $350. It’s worth it.