#Titanuary ‘Road Of Bones’ by Christopher Golden

About the book..
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’.The horror evinced in the reader just discovering the existence of the Kolyma Highway means this book comes pre-loaded with sorrow and pain before even meeting any of the main characters.

The notion of a road made by an unknown number of prisoners forced to work until their deaths, to then be replaced by others in the gulags built alongside the road by the Stalinist regime,whose bones became part of the road itself, is truly haunting and unforgettable.So to take that as a starting point is not only ambitious but also signifies a confidence that the author is going to use that background to a tale of horror and ratchet the tension through the roof.And this is exactly what Christopher Golden does. He presents his primary narrators, Teig and Prentiss, and immediately puts them in peril.

At no point in the tale are you ever unaware of the dangers they are in once they have set themselves upon the road to a village where they hope to not only bring this tale out beyond Russia,one of them is desperately hoping to prove the existence of supernatural forces.The old adage of being careful what you wish for comes back to bite Teig (pun fully intended) as shadows gather and menace the unwary travellers,forcing them into a showstoppers finale which will have you struggling to remember to catch your breath.I read most of this novel on night shifts ,during my breaks and have to say it is genuinely one of the scariest novels I have ever read.

The beauty is in the details, a leas experienced writer may have taken this tale and produced a book twice the length however ,Christopher Golden has the firm belief in the story that he is telling ,that he is able to leave so much up to the the mind of the reader much like presenting them with the frozen landscape and asking them to take up a shovel and dig.Which I did and I am not mad about the haunting images which will now occupy a space in my mind forever.
Full of pathos and wit,studded with moments of pure agony and loss, I could not recommend it any higher than fellow author Stephen Graham Jones does on the cover and dare you to read it.
Go on, I double dare you.

About the author…Christopher Golden is the New York Times bestselling, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of such novels as Road of Bones, Ararat, Snowblind, Of Saints and Shadows, and Red Hands.
With Mike Mignola, he is the co-creator of the Outerverse comic book universe, including such series as Baltimore, Joe Golem: Occult Detective, and Lady Baltimore. As an editor, he has worked on the short story anthologies Seize the Night, Dark Cities, and The New Dead, among others, and he has also written and co-written comic books, video games, screenplays, and a network television pilot. Golden co-hosts the podcast Defenders Dialogue with horror author Brian Keene.

In 2015 he founded the popular Merrimack Valley Halloween Book Festival. He was born and raised in Massachusetts, where he still lives with his family. His work has been nominated for the British Fantasy Award, the Eisner Award, and multiple Shirley Jackson Awards. For the Bram Stoker Awards, Golden has been nominated ten times in eight different categories. His original novels have been published in more than fifteen languages in countries around the world.

Links-http://www.christophergolden.com/

Listen to the Talk Scared Podcast featuring Christopher here

Twitter @ChristophGolden @TitanBooks @TalkScaredPod