Having the rescued child Una be catatonic for a significant part of the story made her difficult to care about too and I’d like to have seen more of her origins. There were moments I looked fondly upon the friendship between Teig and Prentiss, but ultimately I didn’t care whether they’d survive and both characters were rather repetitive in their thoughts and actions. I didnt invest deeply in the characters, but the pacing was fast enough that I was kept engaged by the plot. The tension is unending from page one with the constant spectre of death dogging every moment

Danger approaches from all angles in Road Of Bones, our characters contending with the roads, the cold, the creatures and their own injuries. Golden writes the atmosphere brilliantly, the cold between these pages settled into my bones and I couldn’t get warm even under piled of blankets in my own home. The thought of all those miles of permafrost packed atop thousands of long dead bodies is truly horrifying, if ever I believed in the ability to see ghosts this would be the place I’d expect to. I hadn’t known going in that the ‘Road Of Bones’ actually does exist. I was surprised and delighted to stumble across it on Netgalley, so in mid October when I caved and turned the heating on I decided it was time to get stuck into this wintry horror.

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.Īs one of the seeming minority that prefers ebooks to physicals, I’d been waiting for what feels like an age for Road Of Bones to come out electronically after seeing many trusted bloggers rave about the book. Then, chaos ensues.Ī malignant, animistic shaman and the forest spirits he commands pursues them as they flee the abandoned town and barrel across miles of deserted permafrost.

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. Accompanied by his camera operator, Teig hires a local Yakut guide to take them to Oymyakon, the coldest settlement on Earth. Their bodies were buried where they fell, plowed under the permafrost, underneath the road.įelix Teigland, or “Teig,” is a documentary producer, and when he learns about the Road of Bones, he realizes he’s stumbled upon untapped potential. 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. 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.

Road of Bones by Christopher Golden