Book Review: Road of Bones by Christopher Golden.

 

Road of Bones by Christopher Golden

240 pages, Hardcover

First published January, 2022 St. Martin's Press

You know sometimes you just have to admit you have made a mistake not reading a certain author in a while.  I have no idea why I have not read a Christopher Golden book in a bit, but it had been a few years. This was an impulse check-out at the library when I saw this on the new releases shelves.

Road of Bones is a brutal high-concept horror novel that I would describe as a strange mix of Paranormal Activity, Ice Road Tuckers, Wages of Fear and Joe Carnahan’s The Grey.  I personally find isolation horror to be one of the most intense forms of the genre. Maybe it the years living in San Diego have made me weak, but the knife-sharp cold makes the isolation even more powerful. Enter one of the most horrible settings I can imagine.

Far from civilization, Siberia is a big region of the largest country in the world. The Kolyma highway is 1,200 miles of frozen gravel not far from the arctic circle. Haunted house novel? Golden delivers the haunted highway, as the Gulag prisoners who build this road died in mass, doing forced labor in one of the coldest places on the planet.

The history is notorious enough to get the interest of Felix "Teig" Teigland and his best friend Prentiss who are ghost hunters self-producing their own ghost hunting show. They know the risks of traveling on Siberia's Kolyma Highway but the pay-off is high. They have competition, but who else would be crazy enough to attempt this?

Road of Bones is a great modern horror novel.  In the past editors would have made authors pad the novel with a back story to create a doorstop size book. The nice thing about modern horror like say Birdbox by Malerman or The Only Good Indian by Stephen Graham Jones is that they are allowed to be short and perfectly on point. The novel clocks in at 228 pages on the dot.

The story is simple, and the execution is not. Tightly wound around atmosphere at times, and action at other moments in this novel. it has more packed into its pages than novels twice its length. The suspense of course only works but when an author develops the characters enough that you care what happens to them it is undeniable.

Teig and Prentiss are not the most likable characters in the world, but their motivations are such that you understand them and eventually, you are rooting for them. The people they meet along the way the locals as it were certainly are ones you can feel sorry for. The situations work for suspense in ways that tightly pull all the threads together.

Character, setting, and tension pulled tightly together…

“Out the door and into the street, he should have felt free. The night should have felt infinite and open but instead it swallowed him up. As the air swept around him, pressing through clothing and flesh so it felt as if the wind slashed him to the Bone, Teig wanted to scream. The sound in his skull remained but the cold tamped it down, and as he ran across the parking garage, barked a manic laugh Cold? Even freezing sounded absurd…”

There is plenty of horror in the setting, the cold, the road, and all the harsh reality of nature, but as if that were not enough a chilling cliffhanger says it all...

“There is something out there. Pacing us. Right at the edge of the trees.”
Of course, there were. “Wolves?”
“I don’t think so. I think it is something else. Something worse.”

An age-old story, two men travel to the extremes, the novel has a bit of Wages of Fear in it but this time the gold that the characters seek is fame in the sense of their reality TV show.  Out in the most extreme conditions of the planet the only gold struck is by the author.  It requires a reader willing to firmly place their feet in the shoes of the characters but once you do, you have an adventure and extreme horror. Hyperbole is easy with this one. It is a super intense experience what more could you ask for from a novel?