Title: Moon of the Crusted Snow

Author: Waubgeshig Rice

Release date: October 2nd, 2018

If you’ve been following any of my reviews for the last seven or so years, you’ll know (and have read me typing these things before!) that I love Canadian wilderness fiction, dystopian fiction, and just unnerving wilderness fiction. A few of my own books are essentially those concepts all throw into a blender and mixed up for consumption, but very rarely do we get Indigenous Canadian Dystopian Wilderness Fiction and somehow, Waubgeshig Rice’s 2018 release, ‘Moon of the Crusted Snow,’ was completely missed by this reader. How? I really don’t know. Outside of this book, the only other examples of ICDWF (yeah, I’m being a bit too lazy to type that all out again, though me typing this out to explain to you why I didn’t type that out is far longer than if I’d typed that out… anyways) is 2019’s ‘Taaqtumi: An Anthology of Arctic Horror Stories’ which was PPPPPHHHHHHenomenal. Yes, emphasize the PPPPPHHHHHHH when reading that please and thanks.

So, when I read the synopsis of this one, I was really excited, and it wasn’t long after I bought this that the sequel, ‘Moon of the Turning Leaves’ was nominated for an Aurora Award for Best Novel. With that in mind, I bumped ‘Moon of the Crusted Snow’ way up my TBR and dove in, wondering what heartache Rice had in store for me.

What I liked: The story takes place in a small northern Anishinaabe community. Life is simple for the people who live there, though things have improved since they were connected to the larger hydro lines and internet access. Winter is coming, so those who hunt are out getting the last few animals to fill their freezers until Spring and those who have young ones are getting prepared to keep them occupied when it gets too cold to spend much time outside.

Things are going well until one day the power turns off and all communication with the outside world ceases. At first, this is nothing, they’re used to it and it was a frequent occurrence prior to them joining the larger grid. But as the days accumulate and turn into weeks, tensions rise and the community gets a plan together.

Before I go a bit further here, I want to discuss a few things. Rice effortlessly creates these characters and weaves the opening portion of the story with ease. Evan and Nicole feel like old friends, and the few characters we see introduced with depth – Walter etc. – all come across as friendly, caring people who know that the duty of the Tribe council is to look after the whole not the individual. Seeing that this release came out prior to Covid, and having read it now, it’s interesting that this book foreshadowed a lot of the relationship breakdowns and Freedom rallying we saw sprout up when the pandemic hit.

Growing up, a show I watched weekly as a kid was ‘North of 60,’ which felt like a very early prequel to this book. I loved seeing the interactions between the people, the way that the elders wanted some of the young ones to remain their and keep their way of life going and how the outside, wider world continued to creep in and disrupt life. Rice’s depiction of this small town was very similar and it was within those ‘casual’ moments that this one really shines. I say ‘casual’ because we get almost throw away paragraphs that really highlight the struggles this group has dealt with. One such example is an early 20’s man who we find out was being highly recruited to try out for a hockey team, only for his flight out to be cancelled due to a blizzard and he never got a second chance. Or when the kids sit down and we get a wonderful story told to them from the grandparents. For some readers these moments may come off as ‘filler’ or ‘not necessary’ but when we look at the totality of the story in itself, it works perfectly with the flow of the book and with the nature of the community.

Now, the true ramping up of this story occurs not long after two community members return from down south. They were at university and arrive via snowmobiles. Once back they describe the chaos that has taken over the wider world with power outages and connectivity essentially down around the world. Soon after, a strange, towering white man arrives, one who demands they shelter him as he has limited food and promises to help out.

Rice does a great job of showcasing the unsteady relationship between the Indigenous group and Caucasian who has arrived. It ripples with historical implications as well as the constant battle between wanting to help while wondering what they’re really up to.

Evan is a powerful main character. A family man first, with a heart of gold, but one who is distrusting of this new arrival and the threat of others following. And soon enough a few more do. This is compounded by members of the community dying and food supplies dwindling.

Listed at 220 pages in print length, Rice packs this with so much tension, you’ll feel like you’re reading a George R.R. Martin door-stopper. As each chapter concludes and we move closer and closer to the ending, Rice keeps somethings unanswered and suggests – subtly – about other, nefarious things at work.

The ending is a powerful whiplash of anger, frustration and confrontation. It was expected and all roads led to it, but the straightforward way Rice tells this part was fantastic. Just devoid of excessive description, we get action from A to B to C and damn if it wasn’t spot on and emotional.

We get a wonderful epilogue, that shows the reader where things were going and honestly, if a sequel was never written, I’d be perfectly fine with how it ended, wrapping up most loose ends, but leaving others up to the imagination of the reader.

What I didn’t like: I’m actually A-OK without knowing the ‘why’ of the world going dark, as I suspect some readers would want that spoon-fed. And I’m A-OK with the secondary characters remaining fairly under developed. They weren’t central to the narrative but they played their roles when called upon. The only thing that I can see, that might annoy some readers that also irked me, was the lack of the environment playing any role in the sequestered nature of the community. Yes (and small potential spoiler) we do get two characters that freeze to death, but when winter hits and the temperatures plummet, I thought for sure we’d get more of the people battling against winter as well as each other, but for the most part that’s an alluded concept with fuel running lower and the constant fight to make sure everyone had enough firewood.

Why you should buy this: Rice has crafted such a pristine story here. The characters are wonderfully complex, battered, flawed, but human. The community is great and reminded me of where I grew up in the middle of nowhere, and the realistic actions that take place once the lights go dark was more unnerving than most of the most terrifying horror novels I typically read. What Rice did here was sublime and already it’s found a place as a revered book, but that will only grow as the years go by.

Now, onto the sequel.

5/5