Road of Bones

This book will give you the chills even if you're reading it in the middle of the hottest day in summer. Set in the middle of a Siberian winter along the twelve hundred mile long R504 Kolyma Highway, two men are traveling to a small isolated community in Siberia to film a documentary about the supernatural in this sparsely populated area of the world. The Kolyma Highway is known as the Road of Bones because it is built atop the frozen bodies of the hundreds of thousands of Stalin era gulag victims that died helping build the road that then became their grave. Teig is the idea man behind the project who is trying to jump start his failing career as a producer of documentary films. He owes his one last loyal friend, companion and cameraman, Prentiss, eight thousand dollars. If successful, the earnings from the documentary will more than settle his debt. They've made arrangements to meet a guide who speaks the local language and will take them the final leg of their journey to their destination. Traveling the highway in the middle of the long deadly cold Siberian night they find and rescue a girl, Nari, whose car has broken down. When the now four travelers reach the small village destination they soon find that it has been deserted; signs that all the people abandoned their warm homes and walked through the snow into the surrounding forest, some even barefoot. But one small girl, Una, the niece of their guide, is found in a catatonic condition huddling in her home. Why she was spared is unknown but the group soon realizes that something mysterious and dangerous is lurking in the surrounding forest. Nari calls it the parnee, a thing of nature; an antlered spirit with an army of animalistic wolf-like beings that can shift from the physical to shadow. With the little girl in tow, the four travelers now find they must flee for their lives back down the frozen highway pursued in the deadly cold night by powerful supernatural forces. The terror has just begun. A fast read that somewhat reminded me of the classic Algernon Blackwood horror story, The Wendigo.