“Little deal coming up for you: you’re going to write a novelet [sic] called I think THE BOTTICELLI HORROR for…Fantastic…they’ve got the cover already…shows a gal busting out of a shell or something…a touch of horror and fantasy is effective; science fiction is not ruled out.” Thus, Biggle wrote this novelette to match a preexisting title and cover art—which probably helps to explain why it stands out in his oeuvre for its atypically deep horror elements.
Read MoreRobert Abernathy deserves more than my faulty recollections, however, especially for these two tales: both are worthy of comparison to Bradbury, and both are worthy of treatments in other media. Instead, neither has seen more than half a dozen reprints, with none in the last two decades.
Read MoreRather than relying on a single plot device or trope, Jane Rice presents the reader with several at once: the Bad Seed, demonic summoning, and The Weird—the latter arriving in the form of some deeply Weird creatures squirming and swimming about in their own obscure dimension. Most other writers would have been content to deploy only one of these elements, and would likely have split the others across multiple stories in the hopes of selling them separately. Jane Rice, however, does not hold back.
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