Showing A Slaughter Of Ornithes by Jody Rawley

Jody Rawley is adapting his Sci-Fi B-movie screenplay backlog into short stories for Kindle. Here are five new winners in the science fiction horror genre.
The title story of this book is a "monster in the house" and “final girl” horror story set in Venezuela’s unexplored Amazon tepui region. It’s a classic jungle survival creature-feature with Phorusrhacidae (popularly known as Terror Birds). Rawley, who is no fan of horror films, does occasionally enjoy an old fashioned monster-on-the-loose tale. He designed this prehistoric predator story to be educational, teaching politics and science, survival and even theology. The main characters are a missionary couple. It includes rainforest facts, Indians, and romance. It is likely the only story in which you will find a tetrachromat.
The fifth and last story in the book is a spaceship crash and lunar survival adventure that mirrors the 1914 Sir Ernest Shackleton Antarctic expedition. It teaches space history, space science, and current geopolitics. The historic chronicle (the South Pole) and this science fiction adaptation (on the South Pole of the Moon), each follow a crew of men marooned in a dark freezing wilderness during a global conflagration. The personalities of explorers Ernest Shackleton and Robert Falcon Scott (and Apollo 15’s Dave Scott), are the keys to the mystery.
Three literary short works separate these two novellas. In the first of these three, a seven page story (with a two page discussion guide), titled, “Last Place On Earth,” Pliestocene wolves attack a Soviet gulag on Halloween (and yes, the prisoners are revolting). In the time it takes to drink a cup of hot chocolate you can thrill to blizzards, the glow of snow filtered aurora borealis, a frozen ocean, and a pitched battle against weird ancient mega fauna. It is a Cold War drama written in stanzas like a poem, where “A” is for Arctic, “B” is for Bear and also Badger, and “H” is for bomb.
“The Sirens of Celebes” is an eerie SCUBA dive into psychodrama, a study of descent into mental illness. A millionaire yachtsman amateur scientist visits a Southeast Asian reef famous for its aquatic biodiversity and has a disturbing encounter with the locals. This little six pager “totally creeped out” the book’s editors and test readers.
In “Green Hell,” tropical landscaping a home in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida overwhelms a Yankee couple. It’s an emerald shaded black comedy full of mosquitoes and fire ants, and it will likely be the first story you read that includes a Tegu.
So all together (the collection), this is a jungle and space travel, underwater, Ice Age, primitive-setting survival adventure book about married couples, explorers, prisoners, soldiers, a physicist on a plane, a sailor (biologist) on a boat, wolves, birds, lobsters, and Florida. It challenges, inspires, upsets, delights, and teaches readers, and it makes them laugh.
Five beautiful and compelling original works of cover art illustrate this collection.
These horror stories are appropriate for teens and homeschoolers. Each story is an awesome vocabulary builder. They are outstanding for book club and classroom discussion. They are also appropriate reading for teens in that there are no bad words and no salacious content.
Proper e-book formatting is crucial and this book was prepared by e-Book Architects, meeting the highest quality standards. The book comes with a quality seal (a display page in the book).