Road of Bones by Christopher Golden

Road of Bones by Christopher Golden
Buy Road of Bones by Christopher Golden at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com
Category: Horror
Reviewer: John Lloyd
Summary: This didn't quite get what it might have done from its rarefied setting, and has some dubious beats and unlikely character motives. But for fans of gory fantasy/horror melanges it will still present as a distinctive title.
Buy? Maybe	Borrow? Maybe
Pages: 256	Date: November 2022
Publisher: Titan Books
External links: Author's website
ISBN: 9781803361475
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The Kolyma Highway… the 'Road of Bones'… the R504. Stretching for over a thousand miles across Siberia, it's one of the world's most notorious routes. For months of the year it's a spread of sheet ice suspended above the permafrost surrounding it, while its 'spring' sees it turn into a huge blodge of unremitting, apocalyptic-level mud, which dries into rutted, puddly dust. I don't think google streetview updates it very often. Built because Stalin wanted so much uranium and other Siberian minerals, and because he wanted to give too many people a lesson, it legendarily cost a life every metre it covers. You can easily find documentaries about it online, but that's a bit rich, for one of our main characters, Felix 'Teig' Teigland, is a film-maker, doing a recce with his cameraman buddy, John Prentiss – who's mostly there to encourage the project to fruition to claw back some of the funds he'd invested in the pair's prior TV projects. They pick up their oh-so-chatty local guide, gain the company of a local beauty, and fetch up at the guide's childhood village. And that's where things start to go awry…

When things do go awry – and there could easily be a few superlatives before that word, so awry do things get – it's easy to see what kind of book this is. It reads very much as one of those "ooh, isn't colonialism bad?!" stories, even if brought into the modern world of wannabe TV executives and taken to one of the most remote sectors of the globe. The Siberia of these pages is always somewhere we should seldom be – especially if white, middle aged men, and especially if bringing our own expectations and our own baggage with us.

There is more to this than that, however, and what I think the piece ends up as being is a dark fantasy – one with lashings of gore where needed, and the creep of cold and crepuscular. I can't quite tell how authentic any of its lore or Siberian mythos might be, but that wasn't a problem. And anyway, the book wins or loses on how it chills the very non-Siberian readership. Stephen King declares this will scare the hell out of you, after all. And sorry to say it didn't in this instance, as much as I didn't put the heating on and saw nobody while reading it. There is a case to be said for the cold and gloom – and the cold – to be rather a monotonous, cold setting. Did I say it's cold? I'm sure the main character ponders how the local language deals with superlatives of cold more than once.

So this might be an instance of a title proving one of my laws about books – that one where the puff-quote count is in inverse proportion to the actual success of the read. This didn't quite meet the requirement, however, for the amount of them indicated something worse than what I found. This was highly visual throughout, and while the cold and the claustrophobia and the paradox of the wide open wastes being such a confining environment didn't quite hit the right notes with me, it definitely will with some lucky readers. But several things did hinder this getting a truly positive rating, amongst them also the key fact I never believed in the charitable, save-others-as-if-they're-my-brothers aspect of someone's actions, certainly when taken to the extreme as here. Their backstory tries to justify it, in vain, I thought.

As I might have intimated with the opening paragraph above, though, I have an affinity with the road as a subject, and it was a welcome change to have a genre book pick this as a setting. It definitely gives the piece a feel far removed from the norm. I was convinced very early on, wrongly as it turns out, that Christopher Snowblind Golden was using first-hand experience of the places, and not Internet research. So there are merits in this choice – just not quite enough. I must still thank the publishers for my review copy.

Far North by Marcel Theroux also takes us to the colder corners of the world, in fine fashion.

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