Alicia: Eduardo Arias on fear, control, and the dark Wonderland beneath Manhattan

When Eduardo “Eddy” Arias sat down to write Alicia, he didn’t begin with an outline or a grand plan. He began with an image. A wealthy Manhattan couple, desperate for a child, hire their undocumented housekeeper as a surrogate—then she vanishes weeks before giving birth. What begins as a search for the missing woman turns into something darker: the realization that the couple cares more about the baby she carried than about her life. “That moral inversion stayed the same,” Arias says. “Everything else evolved, but that haunting contradiction was the book’s spine.”

All images featured are film stills from Eddy Arias’s earlier works Ellipsis and White & Black, offering a glimpse into his cinematic roots and visual storytelling style.

Arias’s debut novel, now available on Amazon and AliciaTheBook.com, reads like a psychological thriller dressed in literary clothes. Alicia moves with the rhythm of a film—unsurprising, given Arias’s background as a filmmaker and executive at Paramount and Sony Pictures. The former NYU Law graduate, who teaches media negotiation at the University of Miami, has lived many lives: lawyer, producer, storyteller. Yet the most pivotal story of his life—the 24-hour kidnapping of his mother in Venezuela—reshaped how he writes about fear and loss.

“Real fear is something you have to manage,” Arias says. “Sometimes, you have to let go of control.”

Power love betrayal

That lesson bleeds into every page of Alicia. The book is as much about the violence of power as it is about love. The story unfolds from the point of view of Claire Cooper, the elegant art dealer who convinces herself she’s helping her housekeeper by offering her “a chance”—a decision that sets in motion a chain of ethical, emotional, and legal collapses. Arias frames the narrative as a modern retelling of Alice in Wonderland, only this time through the Queen of Hearts’ eyes. “I was more interested in exploring the other side,” he says. “For me, the real story was about control, and I could only explore that honestly through her point of view.”

The Queen’s gaze

Claire’s Manhattan is Arias’s Wonderland: dazzling, claustrophobic, and morally inverted. The Upper East Side glitters with privilege, but every luxury conceals quiet despair. “I knew people whose lives looked like Claire and Andrew’s,” Arias recalls. “Polished, successful, picture-perfect from the outside. But underneath that perfection, there was a sadness and a kind of loneliness that no one ever admitted to.” That contradiction—between image and interior—becomes the novel’s heartbeat.

As Claire’s perfect world begins to unravel, Arias pushes readers to question the kindness of privilege itself. “Privilege often disguises itself as kindness,” he says. “Claire convinces herself she’s helping Alicia, but that help comes with ownership, conditions, and leverage.” Writing those scenes, Arias explains, meant confronting how power protects itself under the guise of compassion.

“Moral tension is what keeps the pages turning,” he says. “I wanted discomfort, not comfort.”

From film to fiction

Arias’s filmmaking background taught him discipline. “Film taught me economy: every line must serve story or character,” he says. “But it also trained me to cut too early. In fiction, sometimes you have to let discomfort unfold instead of editing it away.” That refusal to look away defines Alicia. His prose is cinematic yet restrained, capturing New York City as a place where beauty and exploitation coexist within a hundred feet.

His influences run deep. He cites Kazuo Ishiguro as a major inspiration: “His restraint creates unbearable tension. Nothing explodes, but everything trembles.” That quiet dread hums throughout Alicia, where the danger is emotional, not physical. Even when the mystery drives forward—the missing surrogate, the unraveling marriage—what lingers is unease. The real suspense lies in what the characters cannot admit.

The law of love and control

Arias’s years at NYU Law also shape his storytelling. “Every contract is a story about control,” he says. In Alicia, the surrogacy agreement is both invisible and binding—a legal fiction that mirrors the emotional ones people construct to survive. Claire holds all the leverage; Alicia, undocumented and unprotected, has none. The imbalance drives the book’s tragedy.

For Arias, control is love’s disguise. “We often try to control what we’re too afraid to lose,” he explains. “But the closer we get to someone, the easier it should be to accept that love isn’t ownership—it’s connection.” That insight—delivered without sentimentality—anchors Alicia’s emotional core.

A darker Wonderland

Alicia transforms the familiar rabbit hole into a tunnel beneath the American dream. Wonderland isn’t fantasy here—it’s a moral labyrinth. “In my version, falling down the rabbit hole means crossing legal, personal, and ethical borders,” Arias says. The city becomes a stage for contradictions: a place of ambition and invisibility, compassion and cruelty, order and chaos.

“New York is Wonderland,” he says. “It’s where beauty and exploitation live side by side.”

Through that lens, Alicia feels both allegorical and frighteningly real. The missing surrogate is not just one woman; she’s the embodiment of every unseen worker sustaining privilege from the shadows. “It’s about the invisible worlds beneath the polished surface,” Arias says. “The quiet moral cracks that run through even the most beautiful homes.”

The filmmaker’s precision

Arias brings the discipline of film structure to prose: sharp scenes, deliberate pacing, dialogue that hums with tension. Yet his novelist’s instincts pull in the opposite direction, allowing silence to linger. He envisions Alicia as a bridge between media—an intimate story that could, one day, return to the screen. “I’d love to direct it,” he says. “But the danger with adaptation is explaining too much. If I ever direct Alicia, I’d approach it as a psychological mystery rather than a thriller—something that lives more in silence than in action.”

The cinematic qualities are unmistakable: stark imagery, rhythmic sentences, a constant interplay of movement and pause. Each chapter feels like a scene cut with surgical precision, yet Arias refuses neat resolutions. “The stories that scare you most,” he says, “are the ones worth writing.”

Fear, loss, and redemption

The kidnapping of Arias’s mother remains an unspoken ghost in his work. It taught him about surrender, about the futility of control. “We had to let the negotiator take charge,” he recalls. “That experience completely changed how I write. Every act of control comes from the need to protect what you love, even when you’re powerless.”

That paradox—love as both salvation and weapon—drives Alicia. Its final chapters leave readers suspended between empathy and judgment, forced to confront their own moral thresholds. Arias doesn’t offer answers; he offers reflection. “I want readers to question their own limits,” he says. “Compassion should be the feeling that lingers after the final page.”

The story beneath the story

What began as a screenplay idea in 2008 evolved into a full-length novel only after Arias recognized that a book could reach readers directly—no studio greenlight required. “A screenplay might be read by ten people,” he says. “A novel can reach thousands. I wanted to hear directly from readers, not gatekeepers.”

That impulse—to connect without mediation—mirrors the novel’s themes. Alicia is about invisible people, unseen labor, and the illusions of control that structure modern life. By writing from the perspective of privilege, Arias forces readers to sit in discomfort. It’s not a book that flatters; it’s one that exposes.

“Every choice has a shadow,” he says. “Every act of love hides a secret.”

A descent worth taking

At its core, Alicia is a story of motherhood, power, and survival—but it’s also a mirror held up to a society built on quiet exploitation. It’s both intimate and political, a meditation on what it costs to maintain the illusion of perfection. Arias’s Manhattan is not just a setting; it’s a state of mind.

For readers drawn to stories of moral ambiguity, cinematic tension, and emotional realism, Alicia offers a descent worth taking. It’s a novel that stays with you—not because of its twists, but because of its truth.

Alicia by Eduardo “Eddy” Arias is available now on Amazon and www.AliciaTheBook.com.