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Christopher Golden: Road of Bones [Spotlight]

Chris Well

“Tightly wound, atmospheric, and creepy as hell.”—Stephen King

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 (St. Martin's Press), 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.

Question for the Author: “Where did the inspiration for Road of Bones come from?”

“I was just bumbling around the internet one day, as you do, and stumbled into an article about the real-life Road of Bones in Siberia. It’s a twelve hundred mile stretch of road called the Kolyma Highway, built by prisoners the Russians had put in gulags, many of whom were imprisoned on the slightest offense simply because they needed workers. And they needed those workers because the ones they had were dying by the thousands. By the tens of thousands. Hundreds of thousands died and their bodies were simply plowed into the permafrost. Their remains are there, beneath the road. While my novel isn’t what you’d typically expect with that setup, it seemed an atmosphere so unsettling that I knew immediately I had to set a novel there, at the edge of the human world.”

—Q&A: Christopher Golden, Author of ‘Road of Bones’ (Nerd Daily)

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