When you want to chill your readers to the bone, why not set your supernatural horror in Siberia. That’s exactly what Christopher Golden does with Road of Bones. Set on the Kolyma Highway, Golden tells an atmospheric horror that will terrorize you from start to finish.
Surrounded by barren trees in a snow-covered wilderness with a dim, dusky sky forever overhead, Siberia’s Kolyma Highway is 1200 miles of gravel packed permafrost within driving distance of the Arctic Circle. A narrow path where drivers face such challenging conditions as icy surfaces, limited visibility, and an average temperature of sixty degrees below zero, fatal car accidents are common.
But motorists are not the only victims of the highway. Known as the Road of Bones, it is a massive graveyard for the former Soviet Union’s gulag prisoners. Hundreds of thousands of people worked to death and left where their bodies fell, consumed by the frozen elements and plowed beneath the permafrost road.
Fascinated by the history, documentary producer Felix “Teig” Teigland is in Russia to drive the highway, envisioning a new series capturing Life and Death on the Road of Bones with a ride to the town of Akhust, “the coldest place on Earth”, collecting ghost stories and local legends along the way. Only, when Teig and his team reach their destination, they find an abandoned town, save one catatonic nine-year-old girl―and a pack of predatory wolves, faster and smarter than any wild animals should be.
Pursued by the otherworldly beasts, Teig’s companions confront even more uncanny and inexplicable phenomena along the Road of Bones, as if the ghosts of Stalin’s victims were haunting them. It is a harrowing journey that will push Teig beyond endurance and force him to confront the sins of his past.
Golden has crafted a bitter cold an fast paced read that had me gripped, but something really didn’t stick like his other novels. What that is exactly I cannot put my finger on. I thoroughly enjoyed the setting, the atmospheric horror, the vivid descriptions and the folklore, just something felt off or just didn’t it right.
The premise of filming a story for a new television program based on the Road of Bones was fascinating and is what really pulled me into the story in the first place, that and the fact it was penned by Golden. The author delivers on a lot of action, terror and chilling moments, both ones that frighten you and those that keep you cold.
Road of Bones by Christopher Golden is a quick atmospheric horror based in the most frigid of locations. With great characters, a stellar premise, and vivid imagery, Road of Bones hit on a lot of marks. I still don’t know why it didn’t sit perfectly for me.
Road of Bones is available at bookstores everywhere from St. Martin’s Press. The audiobook, narrated by Robert Fass, is available via Libro.fm!
