Book Review | Road of Bones by Christopher Golden

Kolyma Highway, aka Road of Bones, is a stretch of road that serves as a graveyard for hundreds of thousands of bodies from at least eighty Soviet gulags under Stalin’s rule. Fascinated by its history, documentary producer Teig travels to the area with his camera operator, Prentiss. They hire a local Yakut guide to take them to Oymyakon, the coldest settlement on Earth,  where winter temperatures can drop as low as sixty degrees below zero. But when the team arrives, they find the village mysteriously abandoned apart from a 9-year-old girl and a pack of wolves unlike any wild animals they know. Teig and the others will have to find the answers if they want to survive.

Hundreds of thousands of frozen corpses lay beneath the Road of Bones. They were driving across potholed, rutted, icy graves – had been since they’d begun the trip – and there were hundreds of miles to go.

Road of Bones is intense! The Siberian setting is vividly described, where the bone-chilling, -60 degrees cold can be fatal. The book shows how the locals live, and how outsiders like Teig can be judgemental of their way of life. He is a documentary filmmaker making the trip in a last-ditch effort to recoup his losses and pay off his debts. Some of that debt he owes to his friend and partner, Prentiss, who insists on accompanying him. There’s a shade of mistrust from Prentiss because Teig has let him down many times before. But they both believe in the potential of Road of Bones as a documentary topic, even with the risks involved.

The set-up is a little slow but once the characters arrive at the village, all hell breaks loose! The isolation trope is done well. There is a folklore element with spirits and shamans, making the story feels otherwordly. The contrast between Teig and Prentiss’s mindset with the traditional, earth-bound existence of the native people creates a compelling conflict that gets darker as it goes. The characters are fully formed, and even the side characters get their chance to shine. As the book heads towards the climax, their fates begin to diverge in distressing ways. Perhaps Teig’s documentary would have portrayed this way of life as a bleak existence, where snow and cold rule the days, where access to civilisation requires hours of travel. But the book also shows the other side of the equation, where nature and personal beliefs can be wild, vicious, and malevolent as much as it is tempting, seductive, and freeing.

Road of Bones is a chilling portrayal of a fight for survival in a place where death is a familiar companion. Don’t miss it!

About the author: Christopher Golden

Photo by Jason Blackeye