"The new road runs along the old road. I can see it
still imprinted on the earth, not twenty feet away
as I drive west past silos and farmsteads, fruit stands and hogs.
Once in Kansas, I stood in a field and watched
the stars on the horizon revolve around my ankles.
People are always moving, even those standing still
because the world keeps changing around them, changing them."
“Road Trip” – Kurt Brown (excerpt)
We review 3 books with ‘Road’ in the title:
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“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’m a sucker for a Stephen King promotional quote on a book – even though it’s never a reliable indicator of how I’ll feel about the story. This book with ‘road’ in the title is blurbed by Mr King who says that ‘Road of Bones’ will scare the hell out of you. I guess I’m just tough and impossible to chill … *coughs* … don’t sic Pennywise on me, thankee sai.
I did enjoy this read, but felt it gave me more supernatural fantasy vibes than scary edge-of-your-seat thrills. The idea of the Kolyma Highway was suitably eerie, as was Akhurst – a town of 532 people that all go missing – the ‘last stop before forever’.
Teig is looking for proof of the supernatural and the afterlife, hoping that filming a documentary of the Road of Bones will spark enough interest and funds, for him to repay his debts and feel reconnected with his departed sister. When the parnee (shaman of the forest spirits) starts stalking their group, he gets more than he bargained for.
The forest spirits reminded me of something from a Charles de Lint book, which is never a bad thing – “.. the parnee breathed nature, danced nature, screamed nature’s grief. And like nature, the parnee could be merciless” (p132). I liked that the parnee kept evolving and changing shape, from a ‘huge hunched like animal’ to a trick of the light/shadow.
Humans are lured into the cold by an insidious song and are transformed in different ways by the forest spirits – antlers being a popular new headpiece for those taken.
There are multiple threads to this story – the Kolyma Highway history, the present day documentary, Ludmilla releasing souls trapped in the road & the quiet battle between the parnee and Una. I would have appreciated more insight into Una and her passenger, and the hive-mind of the wolf pack, but the info provided was suitably ominous.
All in all, a solid read and one that cemented my interest in Golden’s writing.
Readers who like this book may also like:
“A modern western set in an isolated Australian bush town with a soaring crime rate, where a local constable with a troubled past must investigate the death of a teenage girl whose murder threatens to set the dusty streets ablaze.
Constable Paul Hirschhausen—”Hirsch”—is a recently demoted detective sent from Adelaide, Australia’s southernmost booming metropolis, to Tiverton, a one-road town in rustic, backwater “wool and wheat” country three hours north. Hirsch isn’t just a disgraced cop; the internal investigations bureau is still trying to convict him of something, even if it means planting evidence. When someone leaves a pistol cartridge in his mailbox, Hirsch suspects that his career isn’t the only thing on the line.
But the tiny town of Tiverton has more crime than one lone cop should have to handle. The stagnant economy, rural isolation, and entrenched racism and misogyny mean every case Hirsch investigates is a new basket of snakes. When the body of a 16-year-old local girl is found on the side of the highway, the situation in Tiverton gets even more sinister, and whether or not he finds her killer, there’s going to be hell to pay.”
The first novel in the Constable Paul Hirschhausen series. I was ready to read the second book even before I was done with this first!
I enjoyed Disher’s descriptions of the remote Australian landscape ‘… a land of muted pinks, browns and greys ghosted by the pale blue hills on the horizon‘ (p23) and people. Reading from the perspective of a detective who is battling their own cross-section of a corrupt police force while trying to solve a crime, also gives things an extra edge.
Our main character Hirsch is clever, covering his bases in a relatable and interesting way while still not appearing infallible. He’s been burned before, and keeps meticulous records to ensure he’s not marginalised.
I appreciated that while there’s the main thread of solving the death of a local teenager and navigating small-town corruption, we’re shown that Hirsch still has a lot of ground to cover and job to do as the sole police presence in a country town. This helps to show the passing of time, and Hirsch’s gradual integration into the community.
Overall I was pleasantly surprised by this one – not having read any of Disher’s work before. I’m happy that he has an extensive back-catalogue, and will look forward to reading more in this series and checking out some of his other writing.
‘… Road trains, trucks, cars, the emptiness ahead and behind and shimmering lakes that dematerialised as the highway slipped beneath him. Hirsch didn’t like any of it, not exactly, but it felt less alien than it had when he first set foot out here. Not home, but a place vaguely familiar to him.’ (p279)
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“One outback town. Two puzzling murders. Fifty suspects.
In Unamurra, a drought-scarred, one-pub town deep in the outback, two men are savagely murdered a month apart – their bodies elaborately arranged like angels.
With no witnesses, no obvious motives and no apparent connections between the killings, how can lone police officer Detective Dana Russo – flown in from hundreds of kilometres away – possibly solve such a baffling, brutal case?
Met with silence and suspicion from locals who live by their own set of rules, Dana must take over a stalled investigation with only a week to make progress.
But with a murderer hiding in plain sight, and the parched days rapidly passing, Dana is determined to uncover the shocking secrets of this forgotten town – a place where anyone could be a killer.”
"We're two days' drive from the ocean, but this place is an island of lost souls." (p162)
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