Barrelhouse Reviews: Hey You Assholes by Kyle Seibel
Reviewed by Adam Straus
CLASH Books / March 2025 / 172 pp
The narrators in Kyle Seibel’s debut collection are, for the most part, male fuck-ups. We meet them at work: third shift at a warehouse, cleaning a movie theater, supervising Computer Class (“it’s not really a class”) at a local high school. Seibel specializes in portraits of downtrodden characters working weird jobs, portraits painted with off-kilter voices and framed by humorous stories with devastatingly earnest turns. One might not think the Taco Bell secret menu could be made tragic; trust Seibel, it can.
No job occupies as much space in the collection as the quietly absurd life of the enlisted Navy sailor. The drama doesn’t come from warfighting, nor are Seibel’s sailors warfighters themselves. “There are rules to being a ghost in the Navy,” one narrator tells us as he shams his way toward the end of his contract, administering urinalysis drug tests. Later, another sailor recounts how he “drifted around the ship like a ghost, see-through and only half there” while unmoored (in every sense) on his first deployment at sea. Inasmuch as the military is a narrative wellspring in the book, it has more to do with what service isn’t than what it is.
If there’s a central tension animating Hey You Assholes, it’s the tension between a moment in which life’s okay and a moment in which it’s not. “I never make a comeback. I never turn things around,” Fish Man tells us, though he’s speaking from a time in which he’s “still under the impression it’s all a good omen. Confirmation that I was born with gifts and purpose. Made for something holy.” There’s a happy ending to the story as it stands on the page, but not in the character’s life.
Such condensed and contradictory emotion is made possible by the flash form. Hey You Assholes contains twenty-nine stories averaging around five pages each. The longest story is “Master Guns,” in which a young sailor follows a senior enlisted Marine ashore for leave in Bahrain. There also may or may not be aliens, but that’s a separate discussion. At seventeen pages, it’s more than twice the length of anything else in the collection. The shortest story, “On Drugs,” is twenty-nine words and it made me laugh out loud. In brief, Seibel is a sprinter: in such small spaces, he sustains an impossible pace.
A key challenge for this approach is finding sufficiently intense moments on which to build. Seibel’s answer is often “goodbyes.” A plurality of these stories orbit divorces and breakups. There are reconciliations, too, but not many. In the breathless sentence that is “A Cloud Place” and the directly addressed “The Two Women,” Seibel’s characters plead for a place in their lover’s lives. Each ends with a promise, not to “fall off the edge again” in the former and in the latter, that “one day, I can come home and for that to mean a place with you and Jason but especially and only you, I promise, this time, forever.” We’ve spent a few hundred words with these men, and we know they’re not up to the task. The real heartbreak is the reader’s, looking over a limited character’s head to a future they can’t quite see.
This isn’t just straightforward sad boy lit, though. Taken from “The World’s Biggest Moron Stops Laughing,” the following sentence makes sense in context: “My dad in the basement sucking cock, my wife as the angel on a Christmas tree, my mom smoking marijuana upside down in the shower.” Seibel often veers into the surreal without fully leaving the human realm behind. “Listening to Dinosaurs” is about, well, listening to dinosaurs, but there’s something deeply reasonable about them. They’re not guardian angels, the Kosmoceratops explains; “We’re kind of our own thing.”
“Listening to Dinosaurs” was originally published in X-R-A-Y; Seibel’s a fixture in that slice of online lit mags, and after encountering his stories there, a friend of mine went to see him read at AWP. Kyle is, I should mention, jacked, with a Twitter feed equal parts witticisms like “she effed my scott until i fitzgerald” and videos of him moving heavy kettlebells. So my friend was struck by the fact that, as Seibel stood to take the stage, his hands were trembling. At risk of conflating the artist and the art, the stories in Hey You Assholes are like that: commanding, but with earnest, beating hearts right below the surface. It’s a major accomplishment, walking so fine a line, yet Seibel does it again and again in his book. Your hands should tremble too when you pick it up; Hey You Assholes is that good.
Adam Straus is a Marine veteran. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Iowa Review, The Missouri Review, The Hopkins Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. Adam holds an MFA from Rutgers-Camden.