Reviews

Post-Apocalyptic North

Anson Ching

I picked up Moon of the Crusted Snow (ECW Press) by Waubgeshig Rice because I was curious to see how post-apocalyptic fiction would play out in the Canadian North. The story is set in an isolated residential community in northern Ontario, one which loses power and connections with the rest of the country sporadically—often enough that the residents at first do not suspect the end of the world when their electricity and phone lines are cut. Problems arise once the southerners come, seeking more than just refuge. The strongest part of Rice’s writing is the post-colonial threads that run through the action of the novel. With fresh memories of apocalypse after apocalypse done unto Indigenous peoples in Canada, Rice offers a unique perspective on survival as the small Anishinaabe community slowly comes to face the fallout of whatever has gone wrong in the cities to the south. Rice is sparing with his words. The action is slowly put in motion. What he doesn’t hold back on is a unique attitude of resistance and survival that lends itself beautifully and pragmatically to a genre that runs on doom and mass hysteria.

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