Waiting on Wednesday – Road of Bones by Christopher Golden

Welcome to my weekly segment, Waiting on Wednesday, where I look at upcoming books that I am planning to order and review in the next few months and which I think I will really enjoy. I run this segment in conjunction with the Can’t-Wait Wednesday meme that is currently running at Wishful Endings. Stay tuned to see reviews of these books when I get a copy of them. For this latest Waiting on Wednesday I check out a fascinating upcoming horror novel from a bestselling author, with Road of Bones by Christopher Golden.

Road of Bones Cover

Christopher Golden is a compelling author who has been writing interesting horror and fantasy novels since 1994. His extensive writing career has so far produced a fantastic collection of novels, short stories, and co-written books, across several different genres and series. In addition to his multiple standalone novels, Golden’s has also written The Hidden Cities series with Tim Lebbon, The Veil series, The Shadow Saga, the Ben Walker series, and some great tie-in novels, including a ton of Buffy the Vampire Slayer books. Despite this vast assortment of works, I have not had the pleasure of reading any of Golden’s work in the past, although many of them sound pretty cool. However, I was pretty taken when I saw the synopsis for Golden’s next standalone book, Road of Bones and it is one I am quite keen to check out.

Synopsis:

A stunning supernatural thriller set in Siberia, where a film crew is covering an elusive ghost story about the Kolyma Highway, a road built on top of the bones of prisoners of Stalin’s gulag.

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. 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. Their bodies were buried where they fell, plowed under the permafrost, underneath the road.

Felix Teigland, or “Teig,” is a documentary producer, and when he learns about the Road of Bones, he realizes he’s stumbled upon untapped potential. Accompanied by his camera operator, Teig hires a local Yakut guide to take them to Oymyakon, the coldest settlement on Earth. 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. Then, chaos ensues.

A malignant, animistic shaman and the forest spirits he commands pursues them as they flee the abandoned town and barrel across miles of deserted permafrost. 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.

I have to say that I really like the sound of this awesome upcoming novel, particularly after reading this bizarre and fantastic synopsis. Having a couple of documentary makers get chased by a shaman and his ghosts across a Siberian wilderness/gigantic mass grave is a very entertaining and unique premise that has gotten me extremely curious. I look forward to seeing how this intense sounding novel turns out, and I have a strong feeling that it will be an entertaining and extremely enjoyable read. Road of Bones currently has a release date of 25 January 2022, and it should be a very fun novel to check out early in the new year.