He Used To Do Dangerous Things is a collection of short stories by Gaia Holmes that interrogates the countless experiences that make up human existence. Holmes blends the grittiness of real life with unique supernatural elements, whether it be a man’s unusually close affinity with nature and animals, a goldfish that glows brighter than the sun when made happy, or a Kraken causing havoc in the flat next door.

Many of the topics of this collection are filled with emotional weight. It opens with He Used To Do Dangerous Things, a piece about a woman whose partner recently died in a car crash and the strange event that happened while she sat next to his dead body in the ruined vehicle, still alive but not wholly herself. A story stricken with the confusion of grief and weaved with mysticism, it acts as a bold opening to the collection and sets the tone for the subsequent stories. In Poached, a couple struggle to conceive. Upon his wife’s suggestion that he may be infertile, the husband wrestles with self-doubt and his levels of ‘manliness’ while expelling his frustrations at the unwelcome magpies in his back garden. In Shadow Play, an old man reaching the end of his life struggles with his memory. When a power cut affecting the whole street plunges his household into darkness, a light is sparked in his mind, and for a short while, his memories return in a tender, melancholy story that draws a stark contrast between the vigour of new life and the fading of an old one.

While Holmes’s themes of loss, failure, and ageing, themes that transcend a time or a place, are prevalent in many stories in this collection, she also allows space for more specific occurrences. Stories like Surge and Defrosting ground the collection in a point in time: the global pandemic caused by COVID-19. Holmes casts a light on the older generations and explores the isolation and depression that enveloped many who had no support, as well as the sudden deaths that left those grieving with nowhere to go for comfort. Strange circumstances are also featured in this collection: 198 Methods of NVDA follows a young woman joining a protest against cutting down trees in a rural area. The story interlaces her mental state with the state of the protest and the trees themselves, with the rising tension in the woman reflecting the rising tensions of the protest, as she refuses to remove herself. Universal Stain Remover features a woman’s career as a house-sitter, blending insights into her levels of respect for each of the houses she keeps company with her tortured history from a violent relationship.

Holmes does not limit herself to heavy themes or real-life occurrences in this collection; many of the stories can be categorised as magical realism. In other words, they’re weird. In Gratitude, the protagonist meets a woman who has been holding a door open for years. Never moving, never letting go, she just ceaselessly holds it open for the people passing through without a word of thanks. The pigeons have made a home on her head and shoulders, and, all things considered, she is quite cheery. In Unloved Flowers, a man who has never fitted in with his peers finds a job as a night-time security guard at a garden centre. In his free time, he sits in the small pockets of nature that still exist in his concrete, suburban town and becomes friendly with a group of homeless people. Throughout the story, his strange, intimate connection to nature is hinted at, before building to a climax at the very end. Two hitchhikers in Ratguts and Lola get a lift from a lorry driver whose pet goldfish suffered from separation anxiety while he was gone and lost all her gold. Now he brings her with him everywhere, and as he converses with the hitchhikers about life and love, a miracle happens. Despite the supernatural elements in these tales of magical realism, Holmes continues to showcase her deft skill of connecting the reader directly to the heart of the characters, the fantastical elements providing further clarity to the complexities of human emotion. 

Perhaps the most unique story in this collection is The Basement. This story, as explained in her Author’s Note, was co-written with a man called Gordon Kitchen, who was a friend of Holmes’s father and who drove her to his house after her father’s death. On that twenty-four-hour journey, Kitchen and Holmes also became friends. Kitchen started the story of The Basement and sent it to Holmes, along with a full synopsis, for her to complete. This collaboration led to the darkest, strangest, and most harrowing story of the collection: a man lives alone until squatters move into his basement and gradually take over the whole house. While The Basement may stand out the most from this collection in tone, it is no less moving, and Holmes honours Kitchen by dedicating the collection to him. Sadly, he passed away before she could finish writing the story, but The Basement provides an insight into a creative and bold storyteller whose addition to this collection is striking.

Holmes’s writing is concise, yet rich. She does not embellish her work unnecessarily, keeping her sentences clear and honest, letting the story shine. Each story, however short, is packed full of emotion and truth, and there is a rawness about this collection that makes it linger with the reader for a long time afterwards. The prevalent theme of nature connects the stories and centres them in reality, a simultaneous celebration of the natural world around us and a mourning for it amid the destruction we inflict.

Though many of the stories deal with heavy themes, not all end badly. Holmes is frank with her reader, but also kind, and she reminds them of the resilience of humanity. There is an emphasis on the individual strength that humans possess in the face of adversity, pain, or challenge, and an emphasis too on humanity’s collective strength, and the value of kindness, love, and respect.