Aug 15

Aug 15 Book Review : Mia Ballard - Shy Girl (2025)

Whenever I wind up in a conflict (and this happens way more than I’d care to admit), the first thing I ask myself is whether I’m at cause. Not in a cosmic karma sense, not in a "you manifested this" sense, just the practical self-audit you do when you wake up in the middle of a mess. Sometimes you are the problem. Sometimes you’re not. And sometimes you’re not at fault, but you’ve been walking around for years with a target spray-painted on your back by ancient wounds you don’t even remember collecting.

That third category is the most interesting because it’s the most unfair. It’s also the most human. And it’s kind of what Shy Girl, Mia Ballard’s body horror novel, is about. Except, not exactly.

Gia is depressed, broke, and circling the drain with OCD. The eviction clock is ticking, so she signs up for a Sugar Daddy site, which is essentially online dating with a more specific exchange rate. She gets an offer so oddly specific it’s almost avant-garde: become a stranger’s pet dog eight hours a day, five days a week. Cage. All fours. Eating from the floor. The whole nine yards.

This is the sort of gig that sounds like a scam inside a scam, like getting invited to a pyramid scheme but discovering it’s actually a front for selling stolen counterfeit sneakers.

Nathan's the problem, but not really (except he totally is)

The book is technically about Gia and Nathan. In reality, it’s not. Nathan is the kind of sexual sadist who feels imported from a late-night cable movie circa 1997, back when movies could still have "unrated" editions that were either the same movie plus a random shower scene or horrifying enough to make you dissociate. He has no interiority, no moral center. He sees Gia as a commodity because he sees everything as a commodity. I would not be shocked if this man rented his own couch by the hour.

But the more interesting conflict is internal. Gia isn’t in this nightmare because she "put herself there," but survival means dismantling the fragile and messy self-image she’s been living under. She’s insecure and doesn't understand the depth of her own resilience, which makes her constantly diminish the scope of her existence. It’s a strange kind of self-made prison she will only free herself from my experiencing real imprisonment.

The irony is that captivity forces her into something primal, feral even, where the only metric is survival. And here’s the part that fascinated me: by becoming what Nathan wants, she also becomes something he can’t control. That’s the book I read. I’m not sure it’s the book Ballard thought she wrote. It’s psychological horror unconsciously masquerading as body horror which is either brilliant or an identity crisis.

You are dog now

Pardon me the Chat Pile pun, but there’s a tension between Nathan’s enforced Shy Girl game and Gia’s deeper transformation into a wild, ungovernable creature. I don’t think Ballard mined that tension the way she could have. Large swaths read like torture porn, albeit torture porn narrated from the inside, which changes the texture. A Hostel movie for the Tinder age if you will, but I don’t like Hostel movies so it bugged me to remain on that level.

The seven-year timeline is its own beast. Seven years is an eternity in a setup like this; it’s long enough to learn a trade, forget a language, or become a minor regional chess champion. But I liked how the chapters get shorter with each passing year, as if Gia is symbolically disappearing, molecule by molecule. The ending is violent in all the right ways, but the catharsis that follows feels too neat, like the book suddenly remembered happy endings are easier to shelve. Given the messiness of the climax, I wanted the mess to bleed into the resolution.

I liked the idea of Shy Girl more than Shy Girl itself. It’s 200 pages that could be 100 or 400 and work better either way. Too much inner monologue for lean, suffocating body horror. Not enough true metamorphosis for a fully-realized psychological horror. It’s an uncomfortable in-between, narrated by someone who doesn’t entirely know which part they’re playing in their own nightmare. Mia Ballard is undeniably talented, but she needs to trust her instincts better and let it bleed out.