Sooner or later, someone was going to do it: write a novel that reimagined Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo with a gender swap. (As for the 1958 film, it was based on the French novel The Living and the Dead by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac.) Eye of the Beholder by Emma Bamford (Deep Water) is a worthy homage as well as an utterly original spin on the color-noir classic.
As the novel opens, narrator Madeleine Wight, a London-based writer, is at a crowded tube station when she sees someone she knows. Maddy pursues the man and comes face-to-face with him: "Scott looking at me. Back from the dead."
The narrative careens back in time several months, to when Maddy begins ghostwriting a memoir for Angela Reynolds, a stratospherically successful American cosmetic surgeon. Maddy is holed up at Dr. Reynolds's Scottish Highlands estate, but the doctor isn't there: Maddy conducts interviews with her by video call (and wonders why working from home wasn't an option). Maddy isn't alone in the house, though: she's sharing it with Dr. Reynolds's business partner, a swoony guy named... Scott.
Bamford's reconception of Vertigo is inspired: its gender-flipped premise removes the predatory-guy aspect of Hitchcock's film, making the power dynamic between Maddy and Scott comparatively balanced. What's more, Maddy's thoughts on beauty and the aesthetics industry function as a rejoinder to the movie's iconic use of the male gaze. At several points in Eye of the Beholder, readers will perceive clearly what Maddy doesn't, but then maybe she hasn't seen Vertigo. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer