Rice also sets up a believable reserve as a setting, but doesn’t resort to the usual clichés of rez life as a place of unrelenting poverty. That’s because they are all part of the story - not only of this novel, but the Aboriginal community as a whole. What’s especially impressive about this work is that Rice manages to shoe-horn in references to problems facing the Indigenous community in Canada - suicide, alcohol and drug abuse, missing and murdered Aboriginal women and the harmful legacy of residential schools - without these things getting in the way of the story.

I’m impressed with Rice’s journalistic eye for detail, ear for dialogue and his skill with plotting. It is taut and unforgettable, and holds a candle up to other thrillers of this sort, such as Station Eleven. Moon of the Crusted Snow is Canadian journalist and author Waubgeshig Rice’s second novel. Then a visitor arrives on the reserve, and others soon follow, and, eventually, the reservation has a wide-scale panic on its hands. However, the rest of the world seems to have plunged into a power blackout - with nobody really knowing what’s going on. Isolated from the rest of the world, the people of the unnamed community struggle to survive and hope that help comes from elsewhere, especially as a cold, hard winter looms. The power then gets cut off from the reserve. So do the cell phones and, later, the landline.

Well, one day, the TV goes out in his home. He is an everyman who could be anyone, really, no matter his heritage or colour of skin. The plot of the book follows a young man named Evan Whitesky who is a hunter in the traditional sense as an Aboriginal, but also someone who has another foot set in modern ways. Here’s something that’s a bit of a twist on the conventional post-apocalyptic thriller: one written by a member of the First Nations peoples of Canada, set on an Anishinaabe reserve in a fictitious version of Northern Ontario.

Moon crusted snow