Rice seems to understand the need to establish a sort of normal to make a disaster more strongly felt, but any narrative requires even a hint of conflict, even so small to seem inconsequential next to the eventual chaos, in order to cultivate interest. I quite honestly had a hard time with this one. In the face of dwindling food supplies, desperation divides an increasingly frightened populace.
But, when a massive white man arrives on snowmobile along with a veritable arsenal, the fragile stability they found becomes jeopardized. Most of the story follows Evan Whitesky as he and those connected with governance and infrastructure maintenance on the reserve work to keep order and ensure the community’s most vulnerable members have what they need to survive to the spring. As it’s already only loosely attached to metropolitan Canada in the south––cell and internet service is relatively new and patchy, at best the recent connection to the Hydro grid is just as reliable, causing the community to lean heavily on their old, diesel generators for power in the harsh winter months––the pace at which the problem reveals itself is much slower, and the response is much different, than what a reader may expect within an urban centre, especially since the band council already had some contingencies in place in case of less widespread disasters. Moon of the Crusted Snow explores an apocalypse from the viewpoint of a secluded Anishinaabe community in Northern Ontario.
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