About four years ago I first encountered Kyle Seibel’s work while volunteering with this publication (Wrath-Bearing Tree). He submitted a poignant animated story, “Lovebirds,” which surprised and delighted me. It is unusual to experience surprise let alone delight at my age when encountering new fiction. This was during COVID. A vignette that didn’t beat you over the head with meaning, the story unfolded in a way that allowed the reader to experience the ups and the downs (the hope and the heartbreak) without judgement. I enjoyed it greatly.

So it was that I became greatly excited when Kyle announced that it was part of a book and that the book, Hey You Assholes, had a publisher. That was a couple years later, maybe 2022 or 2023. I bought five copies. The publisher shuttered and I got no books.

Fast forward to early March of this year, when between solicitations for money for progressive and reactionary causes I found an email from Kyle telling me that the book had found a new home and in fact was out in paperback.

I’m glad that there are still some honorable (and wise!) publishers out there, and that Kyle found one. Kyle sent me a copy of Hey You Assholes, which I read with such pleasure that I was moved to write this review. If some day he ever finds the address of the publisher who stiffed him and me, I only hope that he lets me know and has a seat in the car for when we go on an appropriately misbegotten but emotionally necessary mission of vengeance.

Kyle’s stories have that thing every writer hopes for: a voice, a distinct identity, and a message. Some of the stories in Hey You Assholes are very short, no more than a couple pages, snapshots of some weird or messed up situation. Others are proper short stories with a beginning, middle and end. All of them bang.

He writes the kind of story I prefer in short fiction; snapshots of an emotion or a situation. Usually the situation is confused and involves a professional or personal relationship; someone wants something that another person can’t or won’t give. Ambition and love thwarted. Few of the stories are, like “Lovebirds,” optimistic or encouraging; most of them follow people who derail themselves or who find themselves betrayed. Many of Seibel’s protagonists remind me of the main character and narrator in Denis Johnson’s Jesus Son who just keeps fucking up, no matter how hard he wants to succeed and improve. But they don’t give up.

Why would I review this for WBT? Have we turned into another literary magazine, adrift from our original purpose and mission? Absolutely not; Hey You Assholes was written by a veteran (Seibel was in the Navy) and is full of stories set on ships and in garrison; many characters and interactions are informed by the mechanical logic of the service, which is a time-honored fabric by which to weave the tapestry that is a person’s experience of life. Reading about life on a boat, or on the west coast of California, one cannot help but think that these stories would be just at home in Carthage or Athens; different settings for the wandering, weird life one encounters while navigating a wandering and weird world.

It took me the better part of a Sunday to read Hey You Assholes, and if you like books the way I do, you won’t regret it. If you’re strapped for time, keep it by your bedside and read a story or two before going to bed. It will make you laugh, and it will make you think. It will also support a good publisher, which apparently is an increasingly rare thing in this crazy world. In case you need more reasons to buy an awesome book.