Iain Reid’s Foe opens in a haze of surreal domestic dread. When Terrence, an uncomfortably familiar man in a suit, arrives at Junior and Henrietta’s isolated farm to announce that Junior has been shortlisted by OuterMore to colonize a new planet, the invasion of privacy feels instant, yet the couple barely reacts. Right away, I was locked into every tiny, eerie detail. Just fifteen pages in, my brain was working overtime with my first major theory: Junior isn’t human. Terrence treats him like a product he’s checking up on, Junior’s memories of his past are a total fog, and his first-person narration lacks quotation marks to separate his thoughts from his speech, which might signal an artificial mind without true internal reflection. Having read Reid’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things, I knew better than to trust the narrator, but I also felt like this revelation was almost too obvious. I was convinced Reid was using it as a decoy to hide an even bigger twist – and I knew I’d be furious if that was all he had up his sleeve.
As Terrence moves into the house to conduct invasive “observations,” setting up interrogation equipment and forcing Junior to take mysterious pills, the book becomes a thrilling, exhausting workout for my brain. The dynamic between Hen and Junior is deeply unsettling. Their dialogue is so stilted and unnatural that they don’t even feel like the same species. In one bizarre exchange about the scorching heat, Hen asks if the weather affects his sleep or how he feels, to which Junior mechanically replies that he’s aware of it, but used to it. They sound less like a married couple and more like two completely different organisms attempting dialogue. Hen grows distant, locking herself in the bedroom, while Junior’s entire world narrows down to weird, obsessive details, like his refusal to let her throw away a pair of glove remnants, or his hours-long fascination with a horned beetle he finds in the closet. When Terrence finally drops the bombshell that OuterMore is creating a biomedical duplicate of Junior to stay with Hen while he goes to space, my theories really solidified: Junior is already the replacement, installed to see if a duplicate can pass as human while the real Junior was taken long ago.
By the final stretch, Junior’s unraveling paranoia and rage make for a masterclass in misdirection. Following a bizarre incident where he tries to play hero at a barn fire and gets tackled by government agents who apologize for “almost losing him,” he wakes up at home with a bandaged shoulder. Driven to a breaking point, he peels off the dressing only to discover there is no scar, no wound, and no evidence of any medical procedure at all. Desperate for answers, he drills a hole through the bathroom wall to spy on Hen and Terrence. Watching them sit uncomfortably close in the guest room, Junior finally snaps, bursting into the room to scream that he won’t go to space. That’s when Terrence drops the devastating blow: “Junior, you were never going to space.” As his body locks up, his speech slurs, and his consciousness is forced offline, the real, human Junior walks back into the house, having just returned from his two-year stint in space. The artificial narrator that we’ve now lost was merely the beta test being decommissioned.
Yet, Reid’s ultimate trick comes in the final pages, completely upending the dynamic once more. The human Junior turns out to be cold, rigid, and dismissive, furious that Hen felt any genuine attachment to his synthetic counterpart. Unable to endure the reality of her husband, Hen secretly leaves him, replacing herself with a mechanical substitute who is cheerful, submissive, and lacks quotation marks in her speech.
What makes Foe such a brilliant novel is how it weaponizes sci-fi tropes to dissect human relationships. It isn’t just a paranoia thriller about AI; it’s a devastating critique of how couples attempt to mold each other into ideal, manageable versions, and how terrifyingly easy it is to substitute real emotional intimacy with quiet, convenient compliance. Reid completely delivered, hiding a profound, quiet tragedy beneath a layers-deep psychological puzzle.