The Body Double

November 11, 2019
The nature of selfhood, reality, and power struggles in human relationships lie at the center of Beyda’s eerie debut. The nameless heroine, living in a small, unnamed town, once had dreams of being in the movies and mistakenly thought that working in a movie theater would bring her closer. Years later, she feels defeated and trapped in the job working concessions, but too exhausted to make a change. Salvation comes from a surprising place: a smooth operator named Max offers her the dream job of impersonating superstar Rosanna Feld, who has had a nervous breakdown. Flown on a private plane to Los Angeles, the narrator is taken to an apartment building where she’s essentially a prisoner. By painful inches, she’s transformed into a credible Rosanna: punishing exercise regimen, restrictive diet, even cosmetic surgery to change the contours of her face. The only person she sees is Max, and she slowly surrenders to his control. In turn, he becomes more affectionate with her. But as she gains confidence as Rosanna, successfully facing the public and even Rosanna’s friends, the dynamics of their relationship changes. Beyda favors a slow-burning, deliberate pace, but her psychological thriller weaves a shroud of menace and anxiety. This auspicious debut will get under the reader’s skin and stay there. Agent: Amelia Atlas. ICM Partners.

January 1, 2020
In Beyda's claustrophobic first novel, the body double for a reclusive star is trapped in a Los Angeles home, awaiting her public debut. Rosanna Feld, tired of the spotlight, has sent headhunter Max to hire a look-alike to be photographed and interviewed in her place until she recovers. The body double will be paid well for her services. The catch is that she'll have to sign a nondisclosure agreement about her work, cut herself off from the people who know her true identity, and leave the country at the end of a three-year contract. Max finds the unnamed heroine working a dead-end job at a movie theater. With weak family ties and few friends, she readily accepts the offer. But from the minute she moves into Rosanna's empty Los Angeles apartment, she realizes that Max is more than just a talent scout. Max controls her diet and clothing, makes her study videos of Rosanna to learn to mimic her personality, and locks her in the house when he's away. He slowly chips away at her identity, even coercing her into getting plastic surgery to look more like Rosanna, until she realizes with regret that she'll no longer see her dead mother's features in her own face. The more she invests in Rosanna's identity, the more she longs for her approval--and for Max to deem her ready for the outside world. Once she's there, she's seduced by lavish shopping sprees, exclusive parties, and outings with Rosanna's old friend Marie. If she can fool the press, and even Rosanna's friends, into thinking she's the real thing, she'll have a better life than the one she left. But Max's increasingly controlling behavior makes her wonder who Rosanna is and what she's really hiding from. The big reveal is less surprising than it is well executed, its climax lush and operatic. As she meets her fate with slow-burning horror, the unnamed woman fades like a ghost in a haunted house, its rooms as hollow as the empty promise of stardom. A nightmarish and unsettling story.

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January 1, 2020
Beyda's moody debut plays on the conventions of film noir, with a special nod to Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. The unnamed young narrator is working at a seedy vintage movie theatre in a sad, small town in middle America, while taking a single class at a community college, when her skeevy boss introduces her to the mysterious Max. The well-clad Max is scouring the country for someone who can convincingly pretend to be Rosanna Feld, an actress and lifestyle guru who hasn't been seen in public since suffering a nervous breakdown. Orphaned, friendless, and aimless, the narrator takes him up on the offer, and soon is locked in a Hollywood apartment with only a stack of magazines with articles about Rosanna for company. While the story at times strains credulity, and the narrator often seems willfully naive, the novel has the potency and sense of inevitability of a particularly vivid dream, and as the balance of power between the narrator and Max gradually shifts, the cat and mouse game becomes ever more absorbing.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)