Christopher Golden, known for Snowblind, his Ben Walker horror book series (Ararat, The Pandora Room, & Red Hands), and dabbling into writing spin-off novels from various properties like Alien and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, has kicked off 2022 with Road of Bones, a new folklore horror novel from St. Martin’s Press.
Road of Bones follows aspiring documentarians Felix “Teig” Teigland and his cameraman, Jack Prentiss, as they’re looking for a jumpstart in their film careers. Teig and Prentiss decide that the docu-series to give them their big break will cover and document the ghost stories about the Kolyma Highway, a 1200-mile long highway of gravel and permafrost that stretches across Siberia. After their guide takes them to the north-most town off the highway, terror begins to take hold as the entire town has been deserted aside from a seemingly abandoned little girl. As the group tries to leave the town to find help, beasts start to appear from the Northern woods with the intent to kill. Teig is determined to get the girl safely off the “Road of Bones” before they’re all dragged to their deaths.
What an absolutely fantastic setting for a book. I had to look up the “Road of Bones” before continuing to read to see how factually accurate it is, and wow, what a disturbingly creepy history behind the Kolyma Highway. During Stalin’s reign, the highway was built by prisoners of gulags that bordered the road. Because they worked at all hours and in all seasons, many prisoners froze in sometimes -100-degree temperatures. The ground was too frozen to bury their dead, so the prisoners built the road over the bodies of the deceased. There are an estimated 400-600 thousand dead bodies underneath permafrost along the length of Highway P-504. If there is one haunted place in the world, this is it.
Road of Bones capitalized on its mixture of a treacherous setting and a featured dangerous threat to amplify fear into the reader from all sides. Not only was Golden’s choice for setting great but surrounding the cursed man-made area with creatures from Russian folklore had me fully engaged in the story. We are afraid of the characters getting brutally attacked by these creatures and the sub-zero elements they must maneuver around. The story had me thinking, “How can they hide if they can’t be outside for more than a few minutes?”. In many similar un-escapable horror stories, like Jaws or The Descent, the answer is to fight.
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Admittedly, this is the first novel I’ve read by Christopher Golden (I’ve read a few short stories), and for the most part, I loved his style. His characters were well-developed, and even with brief little glimpses into their pasts, the reader gets to know them well enough to root for their survival. My only issue with the formatting was that the storytelling would blend between third-person and the perspective of any given individual, without much distinction of whose eyes the reader is supposed to be watching the story unfold through. Moments like these were few and far between, though.
The descriptive writing was top-notch, helping me visualize both the physical appearances of the creatures and the ferociousness of their interactions. I don’t use the terms “nightmare fuel” lightly, and the monsters’ descriptive design made my brain start popping out Guillermo del Toro levels of creature design.
The only minor complaint I had with Road of Bones overall is that I felt a light a lot of questions were left on the table regarding the reasons behind why things were happening. I get that sometimes stories (especially horror) don’t always have a rhyme or reason, which makes things more uneasy or scary. Still, with as much effort that went into explanations and descriptions of characters and the creatures in this book, unanswered questions felt more like a hindrance than a scare effort.
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Overall, I enjoyed Road of Bones, and the book will lead me to check out some of Golden’s other full-length horror novels. Road of Bones is now available at all major book retailers.
