Street & Smith held the manuscript for several years but after the war it vanished from their files, and Rice had failed to preserve a carbon copy.
"The Idol of the Flies" from the June 1942 issue has also been frequently anthologized; it concerns an evil boy named Pruitt who has been called "one of the most monstrous children in literature".
[3] After the war she wrote for the slicks and women's magazines, including Colliers, Ladies' Home Journal, Cosmopolitan, and Charm.
[2]: 402 She did not live to see the publication of her second book, a collection of her short fiction called The Idol of the Flies and Other Stories, published by Midnight House in 2003 as a limited edition of 500 copies.
After living in Chicago, Cleveland, and Darien, Connecticut, in 1960 the Rices settled in Greensboro, North Carolina, where John was a manager at a textile firm.