Oklahoma Rain

The story centers around Bill Van Zant, who is taken aboard a flying skeleton ship one rainy Oklahoma day. The skeleton ship flies through rainstorms, picking up children from all over the world and using them as slave labor to row the ship. After the ship zips through the atmosphere, it lands in a lovely lagoon.

Lt. Dahl and Captain Gaunt, two of the skeletons who are organizing this unhappy business, march the children through a tropical jungle, then across a desert, and to a mesa’s plateau where the skeletons have camped. The skeletons choose children's names from a lottery every day, and those unfortunate winners are compelled to enter a cave on the mesa where they must attempt to steal gold and where they are gobbled up alive by chupacabras.

After Bill and his friends, Tom and Mary, are caught while escaping, they are brought before the flamboyant Oracle Kashmir and his traitorous, tobacco-ridden, unctuous aide, Mr. Sanders, who send them to a jungle temple to retrieve a legendary artifact, the heart of bone.

Told in a literate tone with dry humor, this book is for the same young adult readership who liked Roald Dahl, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Fridtjof Nansen's adventure tales.