Reading Vicariously

A stunning supernatural thriller set in Siberia, where a film crew is covering an elusive ghost story about the Kolyma Highway, a road built on top of the bones of prisoners of Stalin’s gulag.

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.

Yeah, don’t think I can recommend this one. It’s just another reason to distrust reviewer blurbs, cover plot synopses, and Stephen King’s judgment (too far?).

The setup is a nice start, and I liked the idea of documenting Soviet horrors in the “coldest place on earth”…except it’s not actually about that. In fact, there’s an entire storyline that feels forced in just to somehow justify calling this book “Road of Bones”.

The characters are stiff, flat, stale, static. The writing feels repetitive (I guess there are only so many ways to talk about being cold, but then I remember the majesty of Dan Simmons’ The Terror), and the situations seem to cycle through scared, run, pain, scared, run pain, strange girl, scared, run pain, strange girl, ad nauseam. Nothing is really explained except for a teensy bit of folklore thrown in at the very end (and that drawn-out ending…ugh).

Even though I liked the middle section the best, and there are a few chilling moments and enjoyably gruesome (animal/human)body horror, none of it feels like enough to redeem the time spent reading this book (yet I did not DNF because I had to know if the ending made anything better–spoiler alert: nope).

I’m remaining intentionally vague here in case someone sees this who hasn’t read it. Lots of reviewers enjoyed this one, so your own mileage may vary. 

Rating: ⭐️⭐️

About the Author

Christopher Golden is the New York Times bestselling, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of such novels as Road of Bones, Ararat, Snowblind, Of Saints and Shadows, and Red Hands. With Mike Mignola, he is the co-creator of the Outerverse comic book universe, including such series as Baltimore, Joe Golem: Occult Detective, and Lady Baltimore. As an editor, he has worked on the short story anthologies Seize the Night, Dark Cities, and The New Dead, among others, and he has also written and co-written comic books, video games, screenplays, and a network television pilot. Golden co-hosts the podcast Defenders Dialogue with horror author Brian Keene. In 2015 he founded the popular Merrimack Valley Halloween Book Festival. He was born and raised in Massachusetts, where he still lives with his family. His work has been nominated for the British Fantasy Award, the Eisner Award, and multiple Shirley Jackson Awards. For the Bram Stoker Awards, Golden has been nominated ten times in eight different categories. His original novels have been published in more than fifteen languages in countries around the world. Please visit him at www.christophergolden.com

If you want to learn more about Christopher and his work then check out his website and follow him on social media.