Reid explores uncertainty of relationships

Junior lives with his wife, Henrietta, in the middle of a rural nowhere, setting out through acres of canola fields every day to work in a local feed mill.

“We don’t get visitors. Never have. Not out here,” he says.

Until they do.

One night, an eager young man with a black briefcase emerges from a car to tell Junior that he has been chosen for a long space mission. Not immediately, Terrance says. Maybe not for years. But ultimately, this will be an offer Junior can’t refuse.

“It’s a chance to wake up,” he tells Junior. “How many people live day to day in a kind of haze, moving from one thing to the next without feeling anything?”

Years pass, and eventually Terrance arrives to prepare the couple for Junior’s • “Foe” (Scout, 272 pages, $25.99) by Iain Reid

departure. He’ll need to make sure Hen isn’t left alone in this isolated place. The best way to do this, he insists, is to find a temporary replacement for Junior.

The stark, unsettling novel by Canadian author Iain Reid is set in a relatively near future, where cars routinely drive themselves, climate change has taken a toll and data collection has become a precise science.

Beyond that, the author doesn’t share many details. As in his first novel, the bestselling “I’m Thinking of Ending Things,” the impact of the work depends as much, perhaps more, on what is left out of the narrative as on what is included.

If there’s one thing the increasingly unsettled Junior, who tells the story, knows, it’s that he doesn’t want anything to change, particularly in regard to his marriage.

“We have a world here. A life. Here. Together,” he thinks.

Hen, whose point of view gradually begins to peek out through Junior’s version of their story, doesn’t necessarily fully agree with him.

“I want my own identity separate from being your wife,” she says.

Reid is expert at evoking a sense of dread from the most ordinary objects and experiences. Junior senses that something is off, but he can’t tell quite what. As readers, we’re confined inside his mind so we can only guess.

In this twisty tale, told in short chapters that mirror Junior’s shifts in consciousness, some of those guesses are likely to hit the mark, and others to miss it.

“Foe” is science fiction in the sense that “The Twilight Zone” is science fiction. That is, its more fantastic aspects are used as a way to explore human nature and relationships, rather than to establish a credible, scientifically based world of the future.

A sly social critique sneaks into the uncanny storyline, making it more unsettling.

A subtly disturbing horror novel, “Foe” lets the questions it raises hover, unresolved, in the reader’s mind.