Jane Rice

Born in Owensboro, Kentucky, in 1913, she became an American writer of science fiction and horror whose work appeared in magazines such as Unknown. Her fiction debut, "The Dream," was published in 1940, and during the 1940s she built a reputation for stories that mixed the strange, the comic, and the unsettling.

She is especially remembered for the novel Lucy, along with a body of short fiction that showed both imagination and a distinctive sense of tone. Some of her work also appeared under other names, including Mary Austin and Allison Rice.

She died in 2003. Although not as widely known as some of her contemporaries, she remains admired by readers of classic fantasy and horror for her originality and her knack for making the bizarre feel human.