"The Idol of the Flies" (1942)

I have little conscious memory of it now but I was exposed twice to Jane Rice's unpleasant story when I was a kid reading these things, including the These Will Chill You anthology my folks gave me for my birthday one year along with the Rubber Soul album. I see better now that that whole collection is full of unpleasant stories, as it also has Poe's "Valdemar" and one by George Fielding Eliot called "The Copper Bowl," which I will be getting to down the line. But this Rice story also made it into an Alfred Hitchcock-branded anthology I probably read too. In 7th grade, as it happens, there was a fad in my junior high school that lasted a few weeks for kids to capture flies, remove their wings, and keep them as so-called pets in tins (Sucrets, as I recall). This inspired me to write a jokey how-to piece about having flies for pets in an English class assignment which somehow ended up as officially my first publication anywhere later that year, in the junior high literary annual. Many years after that I showed it, thinking it was funny and maybe even precocious, to a woman I wanted for a girlfriend but she was so horrified by it that it was kind of a bad episode for me. In fact, I don't even have the heart to dig it out of my papers at the moment. The annual had an unusual name, which I wish I could remember.

At any rate, Rice's story is quite thoroughly creepy, about a boy named Pruitt who is cruel to servants and animals. It has a "happy ending" which does nothing to mitigate what we witness. Pruitt goes out of his way to humiliate the servants and he kills small animals in grotesque ways, such as running a toad through with a stick. It dies slowly. We would now consider Pruitt prime material to be a serial killer sooner or later, and we might even wonder a little about Rice (perhaps the way that woman did about me). It's a fiendish imagination Rice applies here. I was tempted to lay it off on the publication date, thinking she was British because the story feels so British, and it must be her rage about Nazis fueling this. But no, Rice was born and spent much of her life in the US South, so I'm not sure what to make of that. It's probably not fair to mention that Nazi laws were often based on their close study of the Jim Crow South. But two more points need to be made about Rice and her story here considering the 1942 publication date.

First, I don't know about you, but these days anything "of the Flies" puts me in mind of William Golding's Lord of the Flies. Golding actually was British and his much-revered novel involves terrible children, including the famously terrible Piggy, who bears some resemblance to Pruitt in being at once repulsive yet wielding great social power. But Golding's novel was published in 1954, written in the 1950s. If anything, Golding would have been under Rice's influence, though there's little reason to think he would have been exposed to Unknown magazine, the floundering US pulp edited by John W. Campbell where Rice's story first appeared (in the months before the magazine went under).

The other obvious comparison is Jerome Bixby's 1953 story "It's a Good Life." Again, Rice came first—but there's a better chance that Bixby, who was about 19 in 1942 and went on himself to edit Planet Stories in 1950, was familiar with Rice's story. Bixby's evil child is quite different from and much more powerful than Pruitt. For that matter, the evil child is a recurring figure in horror and likely has roots in the 19th century, maybe in doll stories. But the fear and loathing that Rice's and Bixby's children raise among adults are clearly parallel.

So kudos to Rice for contributing so effectively to the conte cruel sector of horror story, which I also see now in many ways is where I started in horror—certainly that is what the stories in These Will Chill You feature in the main, though both "The Idol of the Flies" and others in that anthology also bear supernatural elements. Conte cruel is a French term I learned recently for what I have been thinking of as stories of human cruelty (though often the cruelty comes in the form of twists of fate as well). The term comes from a 19th-century collection by the French writer Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, with whom I'm just becoming acquainted. Conte cruel also has obvious overlaps with true-crime journalism, in many ways its purest form.

In recent years my interests in horror have broadened well beyond that, though I'm still fascinated by the eternally recurring nature of the events in conte cruel. Yet ultimately these stories often have a narrow binary shape. The story in "The Idol of the Flies" can only go one of two ways: either Pruitt is going to be stopped, or not. Either reprobate characters are going to get their comeuppance, or they're not. If an author is intent on maximal bummer, the demons win. If the author wants to offer some balm of hope, however cynical or manipulative, the demons don't win. There are satisfying ways to do both, but not many. Rice gives Pruitt his comeuppance by consigning him to a greater power in hell (Asmodeus, she calls it). But it's small comfort. There's no taking back the evil Pruitt has already done. It's almost soul-sickening just to become aware someone can imagine things like this (says the kid in me).

As for my own little story circa 1968, about keeping flies for pets by taking off their wings (with tweezers), I swear I never did it or even tried. I had a classmate who did and he kept the one I saw in a small tin like I said. It didn't look very healthy. And I had read this story, and also George Langelaan's "The Fly" (the basis for first a rather lame sci-fi picture in the 1950s, and later a very good one by David Cronenberg), and they made an impression on me in terms of effect. While it's fair to call Jane Rice's story robotic and wooden, still the scenes are inevitably disturbing and likely always will be.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents Stories My Mother Never Told Me, ed. Robert Arthur (out of print)
These Will Chill You, ed. Lee Wright & Richard G. Sheehan (out of print)
Story not available online, but here's one by Rice that the Library of America Story of the Week folks deemed worthwhile, "The Refugee"