'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.'
There are some locations that just seem tailor made for horror stories, places in the world that when you hear of them you go 'yeah, that's haunted'; even if you don't really believe in ghosts. The Kolyma Highway is absolutely one of those places, and whilst I'd not heard of it before reading this book it's one that I've ended up reading up on now; and have been chilled by the history connected to it. With anywhere between 250,000 and 1,000,000 people having died during its construction, with their bodies most often just left where they fell, it's one of the most eerie sounding things ever built, and has more than earned its name of the Road of Bones. A name that this book uses.
Whilst the road itself is real this book isn't a history of its construction, or a telling of the real life ghost stories connected to it. Instead, Christopher Golden has crafted his own frightening tale set on this lonely, deadly road.
Road of Bones tells the story of Teig, a documentary filmmaker who's going through something of a dry spell in terms of creativity. Having worked on a few fairly well received shows in the past, he's trying to find the next big thing that will land him a hit series and make him some money. Thus, he sets out on his latest venture, to create a demo reel for a show about the Kolyma Highway, one of the most dangerous roads in the world. Joining him on this trip is one of his closest friends, Prentiss, who's there to help film their adventure, and to make sure that Teig finally pays him back the money he owes.
Their adventure starts off normally enough, with the two of them taking shifts to drive along the miles of ahead of them, in an environment where if they even just turn off their engine they could end up trapped and frozen to death. They pick up a local guide to help them communicate with the locals, and to add some flavour to their footage. The trio spend some time getting used to each other, and even stop off at a local roadhouse for drinks and burgers. Everything seems fine, if not a little extremely cold. However, it's after they pick up a woman in a broken down car and take her to the nearest small village that things begin to go wrong for the group.
They find every building in town deserted, the doors open, with barefoot tracks leading from the homes to the nearby forest. Before they can investigate far, however, strange figures emerge from the trees, dark shadows, weird amalgams of animal and humans, and large, viscous wolves that make the visitors their targets. The group are forced to flee, heading down the long, winding highway to try and find shelter and help; but the dark things from the frozen forests are coming after them, and won't stop until they're dead.
Road of Bones is something of a chase story. It starts normally enough, introducing readers to the characters and the setting, and we get some small build-up of tension as they realise that something is wrong in the isolated village; but most of the book's focus, and the tension, comes once the strange creatures come after our characters and start chasing them. This essentially begins a huge chase sequence, where the characters spend their time moving from one location to another, trying their best to avoid dangers, whilst driving in their truck.
Whilst this does add a great deal of tension, as there's almost never a moment to stop and relax for the characters or the readers, it does make the book feel incredibly oppressive at times. There's always tension, there's always danger, the threat is never really gone. The result is a book that feels quite dense, despite it's relatively short length. This made it harder to read at times, because you wanted something to happen, you wanted the bad thing that was just out of sight to finally attack because the wait for it was getting too much. Compared to a lot of horror books, where things can take place over multiple days, slowly building and using a slight increase in fear, Road of Bones felt much more cinematic in tone and style; it'd be easy to see the book be made into a film thanks to how Golden has crafted it. I do also wonder if his history with writing TV and film adaptations has helped with this, and if that kind of faster, more intense style has come across to this book because of that.
Despite the fast paced moments and the characters constantly being on the run there's still time to get to know the people involved, and Golden does a good job at building booth Teig and Prentiss into characters with a decent amount of depth. Teig gets the lions share of this, and thanks to the dives into his past and the way that he thinks he ends up being a bit of a flawed hero; someone who I at times kind of hated because he seemed like a bit of a flake, a bit of a chancer. Despite that, he ended up being a decent and likeable protagonist for us to follow.
Road of Bones is a decent horror story with some interesting ideas and a location that instantly stands out as different. Even if you come away not one hundred percent liking the story or the characters the location, an the way Golden makes it come to life on the page will make this a book that you'll remember.
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