For the fourth consecutive year, I am leading a judging team in the Self-Published Science Fiction Competition (SPSFC4), and my team has been given 32 books to whittle down to two semifinalists. To start, we’ve split them up so that each team member has nine or ten books to evaluate, and together we’ll pick the top 15-25% to pass to our team members for further reading. At this stage, I DNF books more often than I finish them, so I tend not to have more than two or three full reviews. But Turn Left at the Mooncrow Skeleton by Linda Raedisch was compelling enough to keep me going for the duration.
It’s a little bit hard to give much plot synopsis of Turn Left at the Mooncrow Skeleton because there is just so much going on. In some ways that’s a good thing, and in some ways it isn’t, and I’ll talk more about both in a little while. But first, I’ll set the scene a bit. Turn Left at the Mooncrow Skeleton features a human settlement on a distant planet whose indigenous intelligent species had mysteriously disappeared centuries prior. Human civilization is confined to a small region that has been successfully terraformed, with the remainder of the planet rife with environmental dangers and rumors of ghosts. The lead is a university student who, together with a few friends and acquaintances, rents an Earth-style house from an unemployed carpenter from an oppressed ethnic minority group. But when her landlord disappears one Halloween night, it leads her on an adventure that will uncover secrets of the planet’s history, its environment, and its people, featuring some romance, some academic politics, and at least one fight for survival.
Like I said, there’s a lot going on, and it’s sometimes difficult to pick out the main story. In some ways, it feels like the main project of the novel is to set up a mythos for an alien world. And that project is one of the ways in which it’s most successful. Little is known of the planet’s indigenous species, and so much Earth-based culture and technology has been lost over the years, leading to a mishmash of competing myths, theories, and suppositions, mostly with dubious lineage and often mutually contradictory. There were a couple moments—particularly regarding spelling changes—where it was so much worldbuilding that it ironically broke my immersion in the world, but by and large, this was a real strength, with a cultural messiness that made the setting feel grounded and real.
And to be honest, I also really enjoyed the way that that cultural messiness dovetailed with what I see as the main story: the hunt for a missing and likely injured landlord that ultimately leads to revelation of so much of what was hidden or suppressed behind the wall of official records. It felt like exactly the right story to tell in that world, with plenty of thematic weight and emotional import for the characters themselves.
My biggest complaint about Turn Left at the Mooncrow Skeleton is the way in which that main story never truly felt like the main story. Between a proliferation of subplots and some tonal imbalance, a potentially excellent main plot often gets lost in the noise. I don’t necessarily have a problem with the main story taking a long time to become clear—there is plenty of time establishing the world and setting up the main character as a student struggling with her area of historical research being deemed irrelevant by the academy, which is a perfectly reasonable way of setting the stage for the overarching story. But once the plot really kicks into action, it just doesn’t come through as sharply as it should.
Some of this is tonal. There are some revelations that get thematically heavy but where the prose just feels a little bit lighter than the content warrants. And while banter in life-or-death situations may be a totally normal human way to manage anxiety, its use in the story only deepens this tonal mismatch.
But some of it is also structural. Some of the big climactic moments don’t feel like big climactic moments because there are other storylines competing for attention, and one story’s bombshell is another story’s interlude. So what I see as the main story’s biggest moments sometimes feel like diversions from an academic rivalry plot or a romantic subplot that’s much less developed than the suppressed history story. The story I found most interesting is all there, it’s just not brought out in the way that it should be (nor does it feel like it’s meant to be a Gene Wolfe-style puzzle for the reader).
Overall, Turn Left at the Mooncrow Skeleton has the strengths that kept me going through the whole story and that makes me curious about reading future work by the author. I think there’s a potentially excellent novel in here. But that novel is obscured by some structural and tonal messiness that puts my overall assessment into the realm of decidedly mixed feelings.
Can I use it for Bingo? It’s hard mode for Self-Published and Entitled Animals, and it also has significant sections Under the Surface and is First in a Series.
Overall rating: 12 of Tar Vol’s 20. Three stars on Goodreads.
SPSFC score: 6/10 for my score. Team score and advancement to further rounds will be determined in concert with my teammates.