He Used To Do Dangerous Things
Gaia Holmes, Comma Press, £10.99

ARGENTINIAN author Jorge Luis Borges once claimed that artistic creation was, for him, like surrendering to a “voluntary dream.” Though he was speaking of art in general, his words seem particularly applicable to his chosen form: the short story. 

Of all literary forms, the short story seems closest to a voluntary dream, in terms of its narrative length, its disorientating propensity to start and end in the middle of things, and its frequent recourse to non-rationalist elements. The magical, the ghostly, the surreal often irrupt into short stories, even those which, at first glance, seem straightforwardly realist in tone and subject matter. 

This is certainly the case in Gaia Holmes’s excellent debut collection, He Used to Do Dangerous Things, where a gritty social realism mingles freely with magical thinking. 

There are recognisable stories here of homelessness, lockdown loneliness, domestic abuse, environmental destruction – but all of them are touched with dream-like imagery.

Occasionally, this imagery can be nightmarish: in one story, 198 Methods Of NVDA, an environmental protester screams “apocalyptically... the scream of banshees, dryads, sirens,” awakening the spirits of a forest that is being cleared for a bypass. In Unloved Flowers, a lonely gardener dreams of his homeless friends “being dug out of the earth, bleeding torsos instead of legs,” their garden sanctuary invaded by bailiffs and “Rentokil men with tanks of weedkiller strapped to their backs, hosing the tents and the tenters... everyone raw and red, the smell of burning hair and scorched skin.”

More often than not, though, Holmes’s stories feature dreams of wish-fulfilment rather than horror. While mundane reality can certainly seem nightmarish for Holmes’s characters, most of her stories imagine something beyond the violence of “Rentokil men”, and “the smell of burning hair and scorched skin”. Like traditional folktales, these very contemporary tales grant wishes to the poor and marginalised: at the end of Unloved Flowers, for example, the gardener morphs into a kind of Green Man, from whom “a beautiful tide of weeds is flowing... flowering, shooting up between the bailiffs, and the machines and the tents.” The downtrodden – the lonely gardener, his homeless friends, and the bats who live in their tiny nature reserve – ultimately visit magical revenge on the strong. 

Something similar happens in other stories: in Universal Stain Remover a victim of domestic abuse cleans away the “stain” of her ex; in Below the Thunders of the Upper Deep, an anti-social neighbour is tackled by a taskforce of nuns and the shadowy supernatural “higher powers” which stand behind them. These carnivalesque stories stage vengeful fantasies, in which the dispossessed and victimised overturn repressive hierarchies through magical powers. 

In some of the stories, though, this happens not so much through the intervention of the supernatural, but through a kind of mundane, everyday magic, where the utopian and the real overlap, if only momentarily. In the beautiful story Shadow Play, a grandfather with dementia entertains his granddaughter with a “whole menagerie of shadow puppets... cats and dogs, birds and butterflies, wolves and lambs” during a short-lived power-cut. In Surge, a man who is overcome with loneliness on Christmas day hides out in the meter room of a block of flats, where he is surprised with a “fancy bottle of port... and a box of mince pies, with an envelope balanced on top... which says, ‘To the man in the meter cupboard’.”
 
The dream-like wish-fulfilment of these stories is both magical and very real. This is the kind of quotidian magic that the allegorical figure of The Old Year talks about in the final story. Refusing to leave on New Year’s Eve, he declares: 

“Most people... just think of my bad bits... towering infernos, crashing planes, drowned bodies on the strand line. No-one bothers to think about my good bits... No-one thinks about... the kids that didn’t get run over, the kittens that weren’t drowned in the water butt, the suicide bombers that decided not to blow themselves up... no-one remembers that dead child who started to breathe again, the kind bus driver who let the woman with Alzheimer’s use a banana as a bus pass.”

No-one, that is, but short story writers like Holmes. 

Jonathan Taylor is author of the short story collection Scablands and Other Stories (Salt, 2023), and the memoir A Physical Education: On Bullying, Discipline & Other Lessons (Goldsmiths, 2024). He directs the MA in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester.