The Daily Beast: “D. Foy’s fiction is the kind that could very well shatter in your hands . . . Akin in spirit to David Foster Wallace . . . and echoing the signature cadences of Kerouac, the narrative of Made to Break puts the machina back in deus ex, and then, in case you can’t believe your eyes, does it again . . . What’s unique in this deregulated age . . . is that Foy’s movement appears to be utterly his own. He is a writing school of one, and Made to Break ushers his literary energies into categorical existence.”

The Los Angeles Review of Books: “More than the revelation of any particular truth behind this pretense, however, Foy is interested in the language and mood of nights like this, when accumulated guilt and despair boil over into a kind of total spiritual reckoning . . . This creates a charged atmosphere that’s somehow both manic and stately, as [A.J.’s] soul writhes in the terror of the moment while also bearing witness to the slower, sadder facts of a lifetime.”

Electric Literature: “Cutting through all the dark clouds that crowd Foy’s world, sensitivity and kindness shined through his prose . . . Foy affords the reader . . . brilliant glimpses into the future . . . [that] add fatalistic poignancy to Made to Break . . . Much has been made of Foy’s language, and deservedly so: Made to Break sustains its manic intensity throughout every sentence . . . Such compressed, lucid writing makes Made to Break always understandable, and a thrilling world to inhabit . . . I thought of Lawrence Ferlinghetti . . . Foy is a kind of poet too, only his mirror walks down familiar streets, making them seem strangest of all.”

The Rumpus: “One thing D. Foy’s menacing and dense first novel, Made to Break, understands extremely well is the strange, exhilarating, depressing, and often stupid and dangerous territory of longtime friendship . . . Foy’s initial setup calls to mind the frontier stories of Stephen Crane and Jack London, one where the scenic backdrop is less about a realistic rendering of space and more interested in creating a mythic, impressionistic arena for testing the ties binding a group of people together . . . This cosmic darkness, the earth’s default setting of violence, is at the core of Foy’s vision in Made to Break.”

Rain Taxi : “Playful and crafty with language . . . D. Foy . . . employ[s] a highly aestheticized language that calls to mind Hubert Selby, Jr. and Denis Johnson . . . Foy offers up a pre-apocalypse end-of-the-world tale about cannibals, mutants, corpses, survivors, road trips, lovers, and friends . . . The game sequence itself is a marvelous literary set-piece, in which A.J. ruminates on all the secrets he won’t reveal about himself and his four friends: alliances, betrayals, transgressions, family histories, some of them dramatized as flashbacks, all of them the necessary ammunition for long-awaited showdowns.”

LitReactor: “Like the last four Two Dollar Radio titles I’ve read, Made to Break has the pacing of a breakneck drugstore thriller and doesn’t cling to any single genre. It plays around the edges of gothic horror and locked room mystery. Foy has a poet’s gift, blending the everyday with surrealist prose, but not so surreal that he loses the reader’s attention. Overall, Made to Break is an entertaining, at times artful piece of pulp trash (and I mean pulp trash in the most complimentary way) that will leave the reader spinning.”

Full Stop: “Breathtaking and cataclysmic . . . The first thing a reader notices in picking up Made to Break is Foy’s phenomenal prose, which I hesitate to even label as such: the term itself seems too restrictive. Like Joyce, Woolf, McCarthy, and others before him, Foy maintains basic structures of the prose novel while obliterating and reinventing the reader’s notion of what a sentence can do . . . Made to Break is the opposite of didactic: it is a question, an event, a song. It is the kind of glorious thing that makes one mix one’s metaphors in the struggle to give an account of it.”

Alibi: “A riveting narrative . . . Sublime and damning . . . Before the party can get started, desire and chance call forth an accident. What ensues is tragic, desperate and transformative, and it admirably reflects the essential natures of five friends and one uncommon interloper . . . Foy unabashedly manipulates metaphor and allegory, etching description and dialogue with a deft touch . . . Here, the scatological and the sacred transcend coexistence, and their communion epitomizes symbiosis. Made to Break’s fictive marriage of profanity and divinity gracefully articulates the persistence of attraction.”

HTMLGIANT: “With influences that range from Jack Kerouac to Tom Waits and a prose that possesses a fast, strange, perennially changing rhythm that’s somewhat akin to some of John Coltrane’s wildest compositions, this narrative is at once emotionally gritty and surprisingly beautiful even during its darkest moments. Foy has a way with words, and the result is a novel that’s comfortably nestled in literary fiction but has tendrils that reach out and touch on noir, tragedy, romance, nostalgia, and even humor.”

L Magazine: “This brashly written debut concerns friends too old to still be friends, which is to say that it’s about partying: about youth and life, both destined to end even though the characters can’t see it or admit it, not even on the last page, not even after a death or with the hindsight of a future lived in seclusion and extinguished revelry. In bareknuckle prose, Brooklynite Foy . . . focuses on insularity, how these people relate to each other, careers be damned, past the point at which they should be going through such self-destructive motions of adolescent carousal. But it’s a rut they can’t escape, their loneliness, bitterness and fear coming to a head during the rained-out getaway.”

Library Journal: “What sounds like a standard setup is anything but, given the liquid language, sharp exchanges, and cutting insights that result.”

Publishers Weekly: “Foy uses a poetic and gritty genre-clashing voice to construct a winter horrorland.”

Heavy Feather Review: “Foy’s debut work is ambitious, and its complex character arcs intersect in surprising ways . . . [The true meaning of the] story is found in the subplot[s]. It’s found in all the tangents, steeped in sex, drugs, and obscure references to film, literature, celebrities, and historical figures. It’s in the torrent of memories these characters share around the metaphoric campfire. All while the external world collapses and demands attention . . . Made to Break explores what really matters. ”