Road of Bones: A Novel (Paperback)

Staff Reviews
Road of Bones takes us to the Kolyma Highway in Siberia. This road was built to service oil fields in Siberia, and was built with gulag inmate labor. If they fell, they were buried under the road. A true and horrifying reality. Golden takes that and adds heart pounding suspense that keep the pages turning. If that wasn't enough, he then adds a healthy portion of supernatural (in the form of a shaman and nature spirits) for a rocket ride of a story. This is an awesome read and will keep you awake (first, reading, then hoping you NEVER get stranded somewhere like this) long into the night. A must read for mystery fans as well as horror readers.
— Kevin LDescription
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, 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.
About the Author
CHRISTOPHER GOLDEN (he/him) is the New York Times bestselling and Bram Stoker award-winning author of Ararat, Snowblind, Dead Ringers, and Of Saints and Shadows, among many other novels. With Mike Mignola, he is the co-creator of two cult favorite comic book series, Baltimore and Joe Golem: Occult Detective. Golden is also the editor of such anthologies as Seize the Night, The New Dead, and Dark Cities, and the co-host of the popular podcast "Three Guys with Beards." He lives in Massachusetts.