Author: Iain Reid
Published: 2018
Target audience: Adults (Appropriate 16+)
What do you do when no one will tell you what’s going on? Eerie and entrancing, ‘Foe’ is a psychological thriller by Canadian author Iain Reid, the acclaimed author of ‘I'm Thinking of Ending Things.’
Set in a vague but not-too-distant future,’Foe’ tells the story of Junior and Henrietta - a married couple living a quiet, solitary life on their farm. One day, a stranger named Terrance arrives at their door with alarming news: Junior has been chosen to take an extraordinary journey off-world, while Henrietta remains at home. Junior will be gone for years, but Henrietta won't be left alone. She will have company. Familiar company. Terrance assures them that everything will be taken care of, but as the time for Junior’s departure draws nearer, he finds himself questioning everything.
Everyone seems to know what’s going on except Junior. Terrance moves into their farmhouse and any sense of personal is tainted. Junior and Henrietta’s private space and home is no longer their own. Terrance measures everything from Junior’s head to the soles of his feet. Junior is constantly recorded and followed, with strangers appearing when he thinks himself alone. He wakes up to discover a medical procedure has been performed on him without his consent, and only vague answers given. There is an uneasy frustration and powerlessness permeating the story, a sense of intrusion and exclusion haunting every moment. A pervasive feeling of being puppeted and watched seeps through the book, infecting readers. A helplessness as decisions are made about you and for you, and no answers are given other than rote company lines,
The insidious horror of ‘Foe’ is rooted not in nightmarish monsters or incomprehensible horrors, but in the unsettling reality most of us try to ignore - that privacy no longer exists; that we are constantly being monitored by governments and corporations collecting data on us, spying on us through our devices. It captures the frustrations of ordinary people trying to find answers or wade through legalese, but who instead encounter systems designed to obfuscate matters. And all this is done with a smiling face and unpleasant coercions wrapped in pretty palatable propaganda pieces, such as Terrance telling Junior that his situation is akin to “winning the lottery” or “fortunate conscription.”
Simultaneously, where Junior starts to feel excluded from his own life, he struggles to recognise he has done the same to his wife. When they first moved into their house and found a piano there, Henrietta commented that she doesn’t play anymore, only for Junior to clean it up and insist that she will love it and play it. Over the course of their relationship, Henrietta has become stifled, existing only as Junior’s wife as he expects her to be. When you make someone the centre of your existence, you can’t allow them to shift or change lest you lose yourself. Yet since Terrance’s arrival, something has shifted irreversibly…
‘Foe’ is a fantastic tale of identity, isolation, memory, and domestic relationships, and was even adapted into a movie in 2023. While the book’s twist is easy to spot from early on, this does not detract from everything that works so well in this novel. ‘Foe’ is an utterly engrossing and suspenseful read, and one you should definitely check out.
