Foe (Reid)

Foe, Iain Reid (2017)

(Not a review, just some notes to help me remember the things I've read. But written this way because it's the Internet, and some people will stumble across this page.)

First book of the year (and sort of the last one of last year). This was a runner-up book for the book club. The blurb was interesting so I borrowed the ebook from the libary. It's billed as a psychological suspense thriller and horror, but it wasn't really horror, except for the paranoid feeling of the main character.

This was like one of those hour-long episodes of The Twilight Zone or possibly The Outer Limits. You're given an odd proposition and everything flows out of that. In this case, a man named Junior in some dystopian future has been selected by a company named OuterMore as a possible candidate to go to the Installation for training to be sent to a space station orbiting the Earth. It had to be random, based on people's interests expressed online over the years, and not just people who wanted to go. A man named Terrance shows up to give him and Hen (Henrietta) the news. (Side note: I wonder if the choice of "Hen" for the character's name had anything to do with their raising chickens, or the fact that Hen wants nothing to do with them.)

After this, there's a lot of talking and interviewing and suspicion, but not a lot of action. And for all the talking, there is plenty being left unsaid. It was like on one of those shows where you just want to scream at the people on your screen, "Talk To Each Other Already!" And you're left waiting for the trip to the Installation. You're waiting to go to the station. Or is Junior going to get out of it somehow? Or is Hen going to be are to go with him?

The book is divided into three parts (although kindle counted everything break as a new chapter, putting 60 chapters into a 200+ page book), but when the second part comes, we don't see to be any closer, except that Terrence has moved in and become more of a presence in their lives. While reading this, I thought that this was a "reader's book" because there's plenty to read closely. That's not me. Ten years ago, I probably would've put it down sometime in the first section. But I stuck it out.

In the end, there are twists, and while I wasn't sure which way it was going to go, I didn't expect the way that it did, and I don't say that in a good way. There are plenty of clues dropped early on that work themselves into the text nicely. It's like "The Sixth Sense" where you could go through it a second time understanding the ending and reading it differently. (Psychological thriller -- what the narrator thinks to himself makes sense to him and therefore to us, mostly, but what if he's wrong?) Unfortunately, I don't plan a reread of the book.

Also, while the author had a purpose for doing this, the fact that the Junior in his POV didn't use quotation marks was a little annoying. I assumed it was because his speech and his thoughts were going to get comingled at some point, but there was another explanation for it as a writing device. As long as there was a reason, I can't complain too much. Not too much.

Summary: it was okay. i finished it. I was a little disappointed. Why was it called "Foe"? Which one was the foe? Or was it a play on words? In any case, I'm glad we went with the other book.