Review: "Foe" by Iain Reid

Even more than a year after reading it, Iain Reid’s first novel I’m Thinking of Ending Things still haunts me. It’s quiet power, and it’s subtle dread are like guideposts to my most worried and fevered nightmares that both scare me and draw me in and make me look a little more deeply at my personal fears. And with his second novel Foe, Reid seems to be at the helm of this new kind of horror, one not built on monsters in closets or maniacs with sharp objects and instead built around some of our most fundamental and terrifying questions like: what is my place in the world? What am I to those around me, to the ones that I love? And most of all: is life and everything in it worth anything more than what we prescribe to it. These are questions I think all of us ask ourselves when we are alone in the middle of night and they are questions we really do not have any answers for, at least ones that are intrinsic. And Reid confronts these questions in weirdly wonderful ways that are both scary but also undeniably heartfelt. This second novel is a change of pace from his last one with a more tangible plot and it’s events a little less shrouded in ambiguity, but still cloaked in a web of terrifying mystery. It focuses on a couple, Junior and Henrietta, a couple in the near future who live an isolated life on a farm. One night, they are visited by mysterious man named Terrance, who says he works for a company that is exploring the possibilities of space travel. He says that Junior has been selected from a lottery he was not made aware of to be shipped into space and stay there for years at a time. But in his place, Terrance says, will be a replicant of Junior, whom Terrance promise will be exactly like him. The majority of the novel deals with the implications of such circumstances. Henrietta becomes distant and morose, a state heightened once Terrance comes to live with the couple once Junior has been selected. Terrance is the closest thing this book has to a boogeyman. His motives are never made clear. He is oddly polite but bureaucratic in his duty to his company, and every word he speaks makes your skin crawl. Reid’s dialogue is effortless and real, making us care for the strange plight of these two individuals and giving the weight of what is going on a horrifying absoluteness. Reading through this, this felt more like a speculative fiction story than a horror story like Reid’s first novel, and that is a good thing. Instead of thinking of Ramsey Campbell I was thinking of the late Harlan Ellison and stories like “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs” where realty is skewed in brutal yet unnoticeable ways. It’s ending is not as impactful as his first, but the lingering sense of unease it will illicit out of some after reading the last few pages is one they, and certainly I, won’t forget so soon. 

Rating: 5/5