Review by Farhana Khalique
Gaia Holmes, He Used to Do Dangerous Things (Comma Press, 2024)
There are these little lies I keep telling myself. I say is, is, is, and never was. I say used to, and never doesn’t.
Mick used to do dangerous things for charity.
In many ways, the opening of the title story of Gaia Holmes’s He Used to Do Dangerous Things sets the tone for the rest of the collection. The reader immediately questions if anything is ever quite as it seems, but is left in no doubt about the emotional truth of these stories. Already a successful poet with three published collections, Holmes is aware of words at a molecular level, and she uses her skills in this debut short fiction collection to immerse us in the worlds of her complex characters.
I have a box crammed full of thank you letters and photos of him… I keep it next to the bed and it perfumes the air around it with kindness and gratitude which is good because the stink of my grief is always strongest in the bedroom, and it’s a deep bassy scent that burns…
From figures dealing with trauma and the burden of their everyday lives, to others who find more unusual ways of escaping reality, Holmes’ characters often seem like people who are on the outskirts of society, but deeply relatable. For example, stories like ‘Shadow Play’, ‘Folding’, ‘Defrosting’, and ‘Poached’ explore the themes of isolation, aging, dementia, broken relationships, grief, and childlessness in ways that feel very present and grounded, but are tinged with darker elements. In contrast, stories such as ‘Gratitude’, ‘Unloved Flowers’, ‘Ratguts and Lola’ and ‘The Gold Ones with the Rabbits in Them’ show figures struggling with the pressures of family, friends or work versus defining one’s sense of self, but take far more surreal turns and twists.
Lockdown for me was quite exhausting. All the Zoom meetings, all the seemingly obligatory experiments in home baking, all the Thursday night clapping, all the Joe Wicks workouts, all the sex, the straining, the “trying”, the hoping.
References to the covid-19 pandemic and lockdowns and their lingering effects are also weaved in and out of several stories, which Holmes uses to explore motifs of communication and (dis)connection. In the hands of a lesser writer, the reader might feel reluctant to revisit the horror and monotony of this all too recent history, but Holmes makes these scenes feel fresh and topical.
Look up! Look out, he wants to shout into the crowded carriage but he doesn’t… There’s a cow. A still thing. People ping and bleep and slurp and rustle. People are squashed together.
Another set of themes that run through the collection are the concern for nature and protecting the environment versus reliance on capitalist systems and technology. For example, the imagery of protest, chains, bailiffs, electricity, power cuts, and the body are used to explore ideas of transformation, freedom and control. We see this in stories like ‘198 Methods of NVDA’ and ‘Surge’, which are more experimental in form.
Speaking of form, some of the stories are significantly shorter in length than the others. For example, ‘Folding’ and ‘Naming Things’ are each less than two pages long, and thus may be considered more like flash fictions than short stories. In addition, the collection includes a story called ‘The Basement’ which was co-written with the late Gordon Kitchen, who was a friend of Holmes’s late father and to whom the book is dedicated (see ‘Author’s Note’, p.169). This is another story which starts off in a deceptively simple way – ‘Like many houses built after the war, it was rather ordinary on the outside…’ – but there is nothing ordinary about the squatters and the delightful chaos that soon invade the narrator’s home.
Finally, there is no one story that is really representative of the collection as a whole, due to Holmes’s variety of subject matter, form and style, but the beguiling ‘The Gold Ones with the Rabbits in Them’ is one of many that stands out, not least of all due to the mystery and mutability surrounding its narrator. From references to chip butties and cans of barley wine, to floating in the Dead Sea, to battery-powered-looking people (that may or may not be actually battery-powered), the story could on the one hand be about a father-daughter relationship, but on the other hand it could equally be about the precarious and easy to unravel nature of all relationships and connections, as we see in the use of this surreal hermit crab imagery:
The last thing to come out is my heart. It looks quite heavy as it plummets down through the water then scuttles across the seabed, climbs into a shell and wanders off to look for other hermit crabs.
From the matter-of-fact, to the lyrical, startling, surreal and strange, He Used to Do Dangerous Things explores universal themes such as connection and disconnection, with a fresh perspective that also feels very modern and British. It’s a collection that is greater than the sum of its many parts and varied forms. Gaia Holmes is clearly adept at writing across all such forms, and I look forward to reading more of her work.
***
Gaia Holmes is an award-winning freelance writer and creative writing tutor who works with schools, universities, libraries and other community groups throughout the West Yorkshire region. She runs ‘Igniting The Spark’, a weekly writing workshop at Dean Clough, Halifax, and is the co-host of ‘MUSE-LI’, an online writing group. She has had three full-length poetry collections published by Comma Press: Dr James Graham’s Celestial Bed (2006), Lifting The Piano With One Hand (2013), and Where The Road Runs Out (2018) as well as Tales from the Tachograph, a collaborative work with Winston Plowes (Calder Valley Poetry, 2017). More recently, she has begun writing and publishing short fiction. In February 2023 she was awarded the Arts Foundation Futures Award for Place Writing. In November 2024, she brought out her fiction debut with Comma, He Used to Do Dangerous Things.
Farhana Khalique is a writer, voice over artist, teacher and PhD candidate from south-west London, and a former a former Word Factory Apprentice. Her writing has appeared in Flash Fusion, Tales from the City, Best Small Fictions, and more. Farhana is also a submissions editor at SmokeLong Quarterly and a creative writing tutor at City Lit. You can find Farhana online at @HanaKhalique and www.farhanakhalique.com
