I purchased this book for my own personal collection.
Publisher: St. Martin’s Griffin
Published: December 27, 2022
Summary:
An American documentarian travels a haunted highway across the frozen tundra of Siberia in New York Times bestselling author Christopher Golden’s Road of Bones, a “tightly wound, atmospheric, and creepy as hell” (Stephen King) supernatural thriller.
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.
My thoughts:
I picked this up on a whim one day at Barnes and Noble when it was a Discovery Pick, I think. It’s not my typical read but it sounded intriguing. Of course, it then sat on my shelf until now…when I finally picked it up and thought it would be the perfect read for Spooky Season and boy was I right!
While the book does start off slow, I found myself completely pulled in right away and loved that the story got creepier and creepier as it went on. I don’t usually do paranormal horror, but as I was reading this during the day, I felt I could handle it. I’ve never read anything set where this book is set, and I think that alone kept me eagerly flipping the pages – it was so atmospheric and chock full of history! Siberia in and of itself is just so fascinating to me but to set a horror/thriller novel there, on the Kolyma Highway (Bone Road), which is an actual place, was not only perfect, but added another layer to the story with its gruesome history, and I found myself going down the rabbit hole of research after finishing the book.
This book was a bit wild and weird for me, but I found I couldn’t put it down. With the slow start, it’s like it gives you a false sense of security and then the bottom drops out and you are hit full force with everything at once. It unsettles you; it keeps you on the edge of your seat and you aren’t sure what to expect next. But yet, I still kept reading because I needed to see how it all played out. It’s definitely not a road trip I want to take anytime soon, that’s for sure!
I’m glad I gave this one a chance…I liked it. It was definitely an adventure, a creepy one but an adventure nevertheless!
