Road of Bones

Today’s post is on Road of Bones by Christopher Golden. It is 228 pages long and is published by St. Martin’s Press. The cover is an illustration of a road that turns into a skull. The intended reader is someone who likes horror novels. There is foul language, no sex, and violence in this novel. The story is told from third person close of the main characters, moving as the story needs. There Be Spoilers Ahead.

From the dust jacket- Kolyma Highway, otherwise known as the Road of Bones, is a 1200 mile stretch of Siberian road where winter temperatures can drop as low as sixty degrees below zero. Under Stalin, at least eighty Soviet gulags were built along the route to supply the USSR with a readily available workforce, and over time hundreds of thousands of prisoners died in the midst of their labors. Their bodies were buried where they fell, plowed under the permafrost, underneath the road.

Felix Teigland, or "Teig," is a documentary producer, and when he learns about the Road of Bones, he realizes he's stumbled upon untapped potential. Accompanied by his camera operator, Teig hires a local Yakut guide to take them to Oymyakon, the coldest settlement on Earth. Teig is fascinated by the culture along the Road of Bones, and encounters strange characters on the way to the Oymyakon, but when the team arrives, they find the village mysteriously abandoned apart from a mysterious 9-year-old girl. Then, chaos ensues.

A malignant, animistic shaman and the forest spirits he commands pursues them as they flee the abandoned town and barrel across miles of deserted permafrost. As the chase continues along this road paved with the suffering of angry ghosts, what form will the echoes of their anguish take? Teig and the others will have to find the answers if they want to survive the Road of Bones

Review- A fun winter themed horror novel. Teig wants to recover his career as a filmmaker and with a friend, he goes to Siberia to make a demo for a reality TV series. But after they arrive in the town to film, they realize that something has gone terribly wrong. Golden gives the reader an interesting and chilly thriller with strong roots in mythology. The real pull of the story is the mystery of what happened in the village. The characters are okay, the writing is good, but the setting is just great. You really feel the extreme cold and the insolation of the characters as they try to survive the horrors that are hunting them. If you want a fun, quick, horror read then you should try this one out. 

I give this novel a Four out of Five stars. I get nothing for my review and I borrowed this novel from my local library.