Jane Rice

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Jane Dixon Rice (April 30, 1913 – March 2, 2003) was an American writer known for science fiction and horror. She was born Jane Theresa Dixon in Owensboro, Kentucky, to Dr. James Thomas Dixon and Julia C. Lynch. Her father died when she was 14, and she later studied at Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, where she became senior class president and editor of the school paper. She attended Webster College in Missouri after graduating in 1930.

Rice married John Thomas Rice in June 1936. They lived in Toledo, Ohio, where she began writing, and later lived in Chicago, Cleveland, and Darien, Connecticut. In 1960 they settled in Greensboro, North Carolina, where John worked in the textile industry. Jane Rice was a devout Roman Catholic who opposed abortion. Her husband died before her, and she was survived by their son.

Her fiction debut appeared in Unknown in 1940 with The Dream, under editor John W. Campbell. During World War II she published about ten stories in Unknown. Campbell bought her first and only novel, Lucy, in 1943, but Unknown ceased publication that year, and the manuscript disappeared from the publisher’s files; Rice did not keep a copy, so Lucy has never been found.

Rice’s Unknown stories were well received. The Refugee, a sensual werewolf tale from 1943, was chosen by Campbell for his best-of anthology From Unknown Worlds (1946) and has appeared in later anthologies. The Idol of the Flies (1942) is another frequently anthologized story about a monstrous boy. After the war she wrote for popular magazines such as Colliers, Ladies’ Home Journal, Cosmopolitan, and Charm. She returned to science fiction in the late 1950s with stories for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and in 1966 coauthored The Loolies Are Here (as Allison Rice) for Orbit 1, edited by Damon Knight. In the 1980s she wrote atmospheric mystery stories for Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. In 1995 Necronomicon Press published her horror novella The Sixth Dog as a chapbook. A second book, a collection titled The Idol of the Flies and Other Stories, appeared posthumously in 2003 in a limited edition of 500 copies from Midnight House.

Jane Rice died at her home in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 2003 at age 89.