Kill Dick

by Luke B. Goebel

ACCLAIMED AUTHOR OF FOURTEEN STORIES, NONE OF THEM ARE YOURS , CO-WRITER OF THE FILM EILEEN and Oscar Nominated film CAUSEWAY

RECIPIENT OF PRESTIGIOUS RONALD SUKENICK INNOVATIVE FICTION PRIZE AND JOAN SCOTT MEMORIAL FICTION AWARD

“If this book were any better I’d cut my own head off.”—Ottessa Moshfegh

“ Kill Dick is a fever dream.”–Harriet Armstrong, author of To Rest Our Minds and Bodies

A fever dream, Kill Dick is a literary thriller that plunges into the chaos of Los Angeles where addiction, privilege, and corruption combust.

At nineteen, Susie Vogelman should be she’s an NYU dropout with no responsibilities, endless prescription pills, and a Brentwood estate to waste away in. But Los Angeles has other plans. A string of brutal murders targeting addicts spreads through the city, and Susie’s ivory tower begins to crumble. The headlines point too close to her father’s ties to an opioid empire, a sinister secret society, and her own complicity in the systems holding it all together.

Then there’s Peter Holiday, a disgraced professor running a rehab scam so audacious it’s almost admirable. When their lives collide, Susie and Peter are dragged into a web of privilege, corruption, and violence, where every escape leads deeper into the rot.

Dark, satirical, and razor-sharp, Kill Dick is a modern literary thriller that unflinchingly dissects wealth, exploitation, and the perilous line between survival and self-destruction.

Genres: Fiction, Thriller, Mystery, Crime, Mystery Thriller, Audiobook, Literature

280 pages, Hardcover

Published April 14, 2026

About the author

Luke Goebel is an author and screenwriter celebrated for his unflinching honesty and innovative storytelling.

A recipient of the Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize and the Joan Scott Memorial Fiction Award, his debut novel, Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours, garnered critical acclaim for its fragmented yet profoundly resonant exploration of love, grief, and the restless search for identity. His next novel, Kill Dick, will be published in Spring 2026 by Red Hen Press.

Goebel also co-wrote Eileen, starring Anne Hathaway and McKenzie Thompson, and Causeway, starring Jennifer Lawrence.

He lives in Pasadena.

Reviews

[Jim · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overwritten and underdeveloped. Not for me.

[Sam · Rating 2 out of 5]

My Selling Pitch:
Imagine talking LA politics with a man who oh so genuinely believes Euphoria season 3 is a triumph. Now let him write an unreliable narrator “feminist” thriller. Exactly.

Spiritually on my do not read list, but I think it’s important to read perspectives you don’t agree with, so you better understand what you do believe in, and this book’s great for that.

Pre-reading:
I liked the Eileen movie, and this is satire by its writer, so I'm excited to check this out. porn.

(obviously potential spoilers from here on)
Thick of it:
The audacity of men describing women’s breasts.

God, I love Clueless.

This is so aggressively male writer, and I’m not having a good time. The flower was asking for it???? Like my guy

I’m at DNF. Like this has to be satire of men writing, but it’s actually racist and misogynistic and insufferable.

Her mouth felt like colonialists is a crazy thing to write.

I feel like some man said I can totally write My Year of Rest and Relaxation. I’ll just set it in LA starring Cher. (Lmao so he is her ex-husband and everything makes sense.)

Can her dad smell her pussy. Oh, I’m so over this.

I don’t think all men want that. It’s okay if he wants that, but he doesn’t speak for all men.

Why are Hilary Clinton, Mariah Carey, and Jennifer Aniston of all people catching strays for not being beautiful enough in this book? I. Hate. It. Here.

I bet this author lovessss Euphoria.

This is doing the American Psycho thing with the brands.

I really hate when books inadvertently suggest people are gay or trans because they were raped as a kid.

I went back and restarted because it had been a minute, and the book is much better if you read it. The audiobook is missing a LOT of tone and rhythm. The formatting doesn't help because it's stream of consciousness colliding with reality and the audiobook doesn't differentiate them and the absent paragraph breaks or italics don’t help that either.

I think this book’s genuinely good writing is getting overshadowed by the author’s weird fetish. There's the all girls with daddy issues want to fuck their dad mindset, and like women want attention from men or they'll die, and genuinely asking whether they should just trade sex to get the emotional connection they want because how could it be a fair trade otherwise, and it's ticking me off. It’s very I have a female main character so I’m a feminist, see! but then her introduction is a shot of her toes, and you know exactly what kind of man he is.

It's so West Coast, and I'm so firmly East Coast. I don’t feel bad for rich, sunbaked zombies who create their own problems. Gimme cold and bitter any day.

It's just coming off that he’s jealous of women because they get the attention from men that he wants. And it's like my brother in christ, pull your head out of your ass. Think beyond your prostate, I’m begging.

Just- How does it not sound tone deaf to you, as a male writer, to have a female character wonder about how she can best demonstrate the new female gaze? It's not your gaze! You fundamentally will not understand it.

The pretentious narrative reminds me a lot of A Certain Hunger’s voice.

Into a bullhorn, fuck your religion. At least he’s getting that right.

You know, the second I compliment him, he’s back doing some male author shit™. Thanks for clarifying you weren’t talking about fucking the horse. Literally no one was thinking that.

Hello Lana Del Rey

She better not be snipping nipples off to make a bouquet. (I truly don’t know what we were doing with the murders in this book.)

All the fashion name drops keep reminding me of American Psycho.

Maybe I’m too sober for this book. I don’t do drugs. They hold no appeal for me. I don’t understand them.

I'm so sick of books including child sexual trauma and having their characters wonder if that's why they're gay. Like that’s not even suggesting poisonous right wing rhetoric anymore, that’s outright reinforcing it.

I would like to dnf again. But Samantha maybe it’s just the character’s warped mindset! Why is THIS the character you wanna portray so repetitively? Do you think the most interesting thing you can do is have a character ruminate on right wing rhetoric and suggest that it’s correct? Do you think it makes you cool and edgy? Do you think it makes you a fearless writer? You sound like a twat.

But then this book is so frustrating because I do like the phrase ‘he wanted to be like someone with their finger on God’s abs.’ That’s banger. That’s great.

The last thing the world needs is more men who think they're gods.

All I can do is heavy sigh about this book. It’s 9 in the morning. This is another one of his female characters who exists only to assist men and is addicted to plastic surgery. And her big claim is that a person creates his own reality, so any history he thinks he knows about the world is something he himself has dreamed up, so it’s actually a moral failing on his part for suggesting that rape and incest exist because he’s the one creating them by believing in them. And I’m just really frustrated at the victim blaming and the language in this book, and I’ve wanted to DNF it multiple times now. I won’t. I’m a literary masochist. But you’re gonna have to listen to me keep bitching about it.

This shit’s racist and offensive and not an interesting thought experiment. It's very white man got high and thinks everything he's ever thought is a valuable insight and gift to humanity, and I’m fucking tired.

The worst people in the world are obsessed with the ortolans. Eating an entire bird is weird as shit, and it’s weird as shit that you’re fixated on it. It works excellently in Hannibal. It doesn’t belong here.

He can’t even keep the voice consistent across characters because he had to do his little teehee, I wasn’t talking about fucking the horse, and now his therapist is saying lol, I wasn’t talking about the bird. I was talking about the people. Like no fucking shit. It’s the door to the microwave meme. I’m sure you can argue that the voice inconsistencies are lending credence to his reality is fake and other people are just shades of you that you’ve invented so of course they have your voice, but I think it’s actually just bad writing.

You need such a broad education to get all the references in this book.

This entire book is just the Sabrina Carpenter “I promise the mushrooms aren’t changing your life” line.

Mr. Rogers catching strays a second time!

Women don't owe you shit.

While I love these particular fashion descriptions, I think a lot of this is a West Coast problem. It's very Selena and Benny.

Hold on tight, spider monkey. (I need to be shot.)

Dude, the diction is so jarring because they’re pulling out every SAT word you can possibly think of and then they’re like lol suck his rod! (Not a negative, just an observation.)

You know, I love a live laugh lobotomy joke, but I don’t like when men make them.

I hate it here. Dr. Seuss literal shit.

I need it to stop talking about shit in such graphic detail, or I’m gonna vom. This is disgusting.

I do not think of the 80s as particularly masculine. I think of the 80s as loud, but I guess loudness translates more to masculinity traditionally.

Olivie Blake’s Girl Dinner and Sabrina Carpenter’s Man’s Best Friend gets the bitches/dogs feminist argument. This man doesn't. He hasn't graduated past the resentment that women can profit off their looks, and you can HEAR it in his writing even when he thinks he's being feminist.

Jealous of the East Coast AND YOU SHOULD BE.

Look, you can't hit people, but I don’t think it’s crazy for him to not want his daughter on drugs???

She's giving us details about the murders that she couldnt know unless she saw them, so I’m so curious as to how she's connected. I genuinely have no guess as to whodunnit. Other than maybe his brother but that wouldn't make sense.

It's not sexy. You're warped.

Why is he so preoccupied with the dad fucking his daughter? Men can interact with women without it being sexual. Maybe he can't but normal people can!

I just don’t think any woman is worried about becoming a eunech.

Hello Bateman.

Oooo. To be fair. I did not see the conduit being Susie’s mom. That was a good twist.

Responsible women do care which candidate wins.

I'm so tired of the bodily functions.

I mean that is exactly the voice of this novel, and I hate it.

Don’t disrespect corgis like that.

I know it’s only a few years removed, but the political criticisms still feel outdated.

Saying Skid Row is like Coachella is such an irresponsible romanticization of a tragedy.

I do love The Secret History.

Detritus sin

It’s the last place rich people don’t own to can we (rich people) buy them? I don’t like this book at all.

I do like that the book acknowledges your outrage and has the balls to call your bluff. Like what are you actually gonna do about it? Read more? That was good. I liked that.

There’s so much poop in this book.

I’m getting pretty annoyed that this book is going so over the top with the lizard people conspiracies when it’s also name dropping Epstein. That’s not conspiracy. That all happened. I’m sure you can argue that it’s to illustrate how politicians do distract from the facts at hand with something so outlandish that the common people just write everything off, but I think it’s in poor taste.

Unfortunately, I have not figured out dick. I don’t know what I’m supposed to have realized about Susie or the story as a whole. I hope the book makes it more explicit. I’m not getting it. (It doesn't!)

Yeah, so I don’t get it at all. I don’t know who the killer is. I don’t know who killed Dick. I don’t know where her mother was.

He just reads like the most performative male who genuinely believes you can’t create art or say you’ve experienced life if you’ve never gotten high. Not everyone needs a pharmaceutical crutch to activate their imagination. And just so much of this reads misogynistic, but not in a women are beneath me way. You just sound fucking jealous. Come to terms with your gender identity or your sexuality and leave them out of it. No one relevant cares if you’re a man or a woman or something in between. It’s the least interesting thing about you.

Homie wants to be American Psycho so bad. Homie wants to be Tarantino so bad. This reads like Euphoria season three. It’s that bad.

Post-reading:
I love how bad lit fic always feels like an inescapable dinner party conversation with the worst person you know. The book’s a swing and a miss, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have style. It oozes presence, it wants a drag out dog fight, it’s lecherous. It’s gonna make you want a shower. If you have functioning feminist critical thought, you’re gonna clock this wannabe immediately. Equal opportunity for female sociopathy, but I know exactly what kind of man you are when you open with a teenaged toe wiggle. And that sour taste is unfortunately never gonna leave your mouth even as the narrative scrambles to unravel into something resembling intrigue. But if you scratch at it, you’ll quickly realize it’s borrowed schticks from writers who have been there done that. Homeboy wants to be Brett Easton Ellis so bad! You can’t dump in empty fashion references and Phil Collins if your satire is the equivalent of an ennui nibble! The whole thing is anesthetized! And I can hear you, Samantha, isn’t that the point? Shouldn’t a drugged fever dream feel that hazy? And it should, if that was one consistent narrative voice of the novel. But this is supposed to be a multi POV. Characters should have different voices from each other, and they don’t. A malicious Cher, a protester turned professor, and a nonbinary street kid shouldn’t sound identical to each other. They don’t have the same educations or backgrounds yet they speak with the same vocabularies, interests, and political agendas. It’s not a psychological horror flair to illustrate this book’s cultish manifesto that reality is constructed and every person encountered is an NPC, even when you pass it through the lens of this is Susie’s story and can we really believe her? I think the author’s just as full of shit as she is. Literally! I’ve never read so much about pooping and farting in my life.

The political commentary felt like a temper tantrum rather than a valuable critique. I think it’s incredibly telling when you’re preoccupied with tearing down the appearance of female celebrities as if that’s fair recompense for bad policy, meanwhile, their male counterparts get cheeky nicknames. Incest isn’t a shortcut to provocative writing. If anything, it’s cheap, lazy, and overused. I think it’s a klaxon blare of written by a man because what 19-year-old do you know that’s pondering her ‘cheap carnation nipples’ poolside and in the next breath worrying if daddy, her real daddy, can smell her pussy?

One thing this book does do well is feel distinctly West Coast. She is viciously envious of NYC and New England, and you know, as she should be. Gimmie frosty educated winters over vapid, sun baked pavement any day.

It’s such a misogynistic book, but it’s almost a backhanded compliment. The commentary reads as jealous of women, of their bodies, and their sexuality, and their perceived power over men. Which like, hoo baby, get a grip! Make peace with your prostate. There’s plenty of boyfriends to go around for everyone. I think the gender identity confusion is too fetishized to be insightful. Everything’s about getting laid and neglectful of other aspects of dysphoria.

It’s just such a weird choice to me to want to write an unhinged woman so you can showcase the artistic female gaze when you’re a man. Because you just won’t get it. You fundamentally cannot get it. That’s the point. An approximation is never gonna read as authentic which is thematically LA, but I’m an east coast reader and that’s pretty much the antithesis of what I wanna see in fiction. Create something so believable I forget that it’s fake, or lean in, and this book fails to do either.

The thriller plotline kept me reading even after the book had disgusted me past the point of no return, but it just fizzles out. I truly, truly don’t think I’m a stupid reader, but this book’s too ambiguous to make sense or satisfy. I still don’t know who the main killer was, I don’t know where her mom got off to, and I don’t know who killed Dick, and when that’s the goddamn title of your novel- Like how can you not view that as a fundamental failing? Not every book is for every reader, but the average audience member better be able to finish your book with an understanding of the core message or something’s wrong!

I hated it. I don’t get. I don’t think you will either, but I hesitate to say you shouldn’t read it. I think it’s really important to read perspectives and beliefs that are different from your own. I think it helps you cement and better articulate what you do believe in. I think it’s part of being an educated, critical consumer. If you love art, you wanna talk about what makes it good vs what makes it bad, and I don’t think you’re picking up satirical political lit fic on a whim. You’re already not a casual reader by merit of the genre itself. You want to think, and this book will definitely get you doing that, I just wish it were in a more positive way.

Also, not the book’s fault at all, but I think the audiobook performance for this is horrendous. It misses so much tonal inflection that it was distorting the book into word salad nonsense. I turned it off and restarted and had a much better time reading in my head

Who should read this:
Social satire fans
American Psycho fans
LA as a vibe readers
Political commentary fans

Ideal reading time:
Election season

Do I want to reread this:
On my own, no, but I’d be down to dissect it with a book club

Would I buy this:
Nope

Similar books:
* Murder Bimbo by Rebecca Novack-political satire, unreliable narrator, revenge thriller
* A Certain Hunger by Chelsea G. Summers-lit fic, satire, revenge thriller, queer
* American Psycho by Brett Easton Ellis-lit fic, psychological horror, satire, social commentary, queer
* Soft Core by Brittany Newell-lit fic, psychological horror, social commentary, queer
* Maeve Fly by C. J. Leede-lit fic, horror, retelling, social commentary
* Fruit of the Dead by Rachel Lyon-lit fic, myth retelling, social commentary, family drama, addiction
* My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh-lit fic, social commentary, addiction
* Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash-campy lit fic, thriller, family drama, social commentary
* Happiness and Love by Zoe Dubno-lit fic, social commentary
* Ripe by Sarah Rose Etter-lit fic, psychological horror, satire, social commentary, family drama
* Mood Swings by Frankie Barnet-dystopian, lit fic, social commentary
* Sirens and Muses by Antonia Angress-lit fic, academia, queer, social commentary

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

[Richard Derus · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Fiction For the week ending April 19, 2026

Real Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A fever dream, Kill Dick is a literary thriller that plunges into the chaos of Los Angeles where addiction, privilege, and corruption combust.

At nineteen, Susie Vogelman should be she’s an NYU dropout with no responsibilities, endless prescription pills, and a Brentwood estate to waste away in. But Los Angeles has other plans. A string of brutal murders targeting addicts spreads through the city, and Susie’s ivory tower begins to crumble. The headlines point too close to her father’s ties to an opioid empire, a sinister secret society, and her own complicity in the systems holding it all together.

Then there’s Peter Holiday, a disgraced professor running a rehab scam so audacious it’s almost admirable. When their lives collide, Susie and Peter are dragged into a web of privilege, corruption, and violence, where every escape leads deeper into the rot.

Dark, satirical, and razor-sharp, Kill Dick is a modern literary thriller that unflinchingly dissects wealth, exploitation, and the perilous line between survival and self-destruction.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Health scammers, like Peter Holiday in this story, might be the lowest scum on this wide, green Earth. Preying on those desperate for their very lives...! My mother's father fell for the Laetrile scam in the 1970s. Luckily he survived more than a few years after it was exposed to all as a hoax, but it cemented my powerful disdain for health scammers as it was an expensive lesson. Fast-forward from my family's 1970s to Susie Vogelman, our PoV character, in a circle of hell called the glittering world of too-rich too-dimwitted 2016 LA.

What's worse than an addict without morals or boundaries? Worse even than an enabler of the addict? The addict turned enabler. Susie, who apparently never so much as once looked into a mirror that showed her anything except her surface, is a participant in a lot of different kinds of enabling in this story. It's very well done, it never lets the pace of revelations slacken, but it also never once shows even a glimmer of realization in Susie or her coterie of criminally negligent creeps. But their surfaces are pretty! And their credit cards are limitless!

I wanted to shake Susie into awareness of her hollowness, lest she implode causing still further damage. But Author Goebel is careful to make this world honest by giving it consequences despite no one in the cast being anything but appalling. Bad things are going to happen, and I didn't care about the consequences to any of the cast just to the folks who were victimized by the cast. The suppurating wounds of vapidity exacerbated by the absence of empathy (honestly, I'm not sure Susie in particular even has a theory of mind) in every character are never allowing anyone to escape dire consequences.

When they come I was deeply surprised to feel...sad is too strong, sympathetic is in the wrong emotional register, wistful is too kindly meant...to not feel triumphant? I think that's closer. I was eager for the comeuppances to be passed around, and Peter the scumbag to get seconds. After all, this was the moment that the country saw Trump installed in entirely the wrong kind of government housing. What use is fiction of not to redress horrifying imbalances?

Showing them to us, forcing us to see that the rot is there even when it's plastered over, and there are ways you can recognize it despite the glittering surface. Less wish fulfillment than cautionary tale. It's well done. Author Goebel (Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours via the deeply cool publisher FC2) has storytelling chops. He has very cool film scripts in his CV, starring Jennifer Lawrence and Anne Hathaway in them. His current publisher is Kate Gale's always interesting and frequently tastemaking Red Hen Press. Given these bona fides why is this not a full-five review?

Because I got uneasy as I crested the halfway mark, feeling I was still outside Susie's world with my sarcastic voyeur of a guide being invited to laugh at and judge these buffoons. It's what they deserve! is implicit in each and every moment I'm in the story's flow. Which, fair—it is indeed what they deserve; but is it your point, Author Goebel, to stop there or is it to force me-the-reader into looking deep into the shine of these surfaces and ask myself "why are you still here with these tacky people." I didn't think it was terribly clear what your purpose was; the only reason that was an issue is its consequence of popping me out of the story-flow to examine the whole read again and again.

That's a big ask, but your story is a national bestseller so I guess it worked. I'm glad it did, and does, and will do the trick again in future.

[Katherine Cowgill]

Kill Dick wastes no time. The novel opens on all that is the earthly beauty of sunny Cal- warm Santa Ana winds that touch the breath of Southern California trees, heavy with citrus fruit. From those first sentences how quickly the reader is brought into the disturbed under pinning that is felt through LA by way of the world of wealthy Marlborough graduate and NYU dropout Susie Vogelman. We find Susie lying by the pool in her Brentwood home, high on Oxycontin trying to keep herself deaf to the reality of the “orange haze of doom” in the form of horrific killings in the news and looming political events. Faking feeling fine in tinsel town. Outside of the book, just like in Susie’s world, even tourists can feel the same historic fakery of Los Angeles when they come looking for Hollywood— a symptom of a culture that hides its seedy unease behind pretty things. It is seen when walking the stars on a boulevard that has the remnants of the angst of an America that never quite got relieved from its anger and now lives in drug addled minds without homes while the influencers make videos and Mann’s Chinese Theater has another celebrity studded opening— everyone using something to feign relief. This addiction to anything in order to deal with America’s darkness is the contemporary world that Susie is a part of in the book.

The territory that author and screenwriter Luke Goebel explores may remind some readers of their memories of the noir world of the Big Sleep where author Raymond Chandler (also a screenwriter) saw the darkness in the sunniest city. But the searing reality of the LA streets in Kill Dick, Goebel’s second novel, is set in an unspecified period that seems to be right before the 2016 election — which indeed feels like right now, and you as the reader want the contemporary LA darkness to be shown. Because if you live in LA, or even somewhere else in America, you’ve always felt it. Finally we’ve been given a novel that plays out the fever dream that no one came for but is provided by the City of Angels for all who came to find a life of sunny dreams.

The novel is crude and disturbing at times, but there is no way you’re turning away once you open the cover. There are gut wrenching killings in the book happening to drug addicts all over Los Angeles as poor little rich girl Susie gets caught up in Oxycontin and her former professor’s quest to find his drug addicted brother. They are all aided by the caretaking femme fluid Royal-Lee, a 19 year old who seems all too gentle for any of the contents of the book. These characters along with Susie’s parents and a questionable “Church of White Illumination” are all tied together in ways you don’t see coming, as Dick Sickler, the billionaire creator of Oxy, is the man who knots together all the characters and their turmoil. They are all in some way dependent on Dick (or his creation) and maybe will stop at nothing to undo that dependancy. The novel is a reflection of the lingering demented darkness of Los Angeles, like the real life Cecil Hotel, a former home of serial murderers, and other seedy motels in which Goebel sets a series of killings.

The contents of Kill Dick and the experience of its characters could not actually be lived without it needing being purged from one’s system. And so the tale must come up and out as an intellectually dense narrative vomit of LA society, which is American society, which is the mess we inherited and are forced to digest through our lives. Goebel’s novel suggests we are unable to digest this America any longer. Goebel’s prose is crazed and calculated- driving you faster off a cliff you’re not really sure you want to go over but you stay for the ride because you have to see what happens. He’s changing lanes on the way, moving from first to third person narration, following different characters and intersecting timelines. We’ve seen it done before, perhaps best of all William Faulkner (also a screenwriter) but here in the world of Kill Dick this narrative technique brings turbulent movement to the story. Goebel’s book seems all too horrific and all too plausible all at once. He makes us wonder, is this narrative of graphic events and characters of grotesque archetypes that live in a war zone of capitalism actually happening in reality? And we’re left with the sickening feeling that possibly all of this did happen, potentially all of it will become future events, and most probably all of it is indeed happening in our current world.

The book moves quickly and slowly at the same time as if itself is a trip of Oxy. You feel asleep, you feel raw, you feel like you understand something no one else gets, you feel like you need more but sometimes get nothing from it, like Susie’s rambling intellectual clusterfuck of thoughts that lead to the minutiae movement in the plot. Reading this novel feels like what an addiction really feels like.

When you leave the novel, you feel profoundly sad. The themes are real- they are present right now- living in Skid Row, living in LA, living in America. All this questioning of what is real in our culture and politics, what is truth, dwells in this novelization about a time that is all too present and speaks honesty more radically than what Goebel calls “the Orange candidate” could ever tweet. Maybe that’s why you feel sad, because you are finally confronted with the totality that we feel up against as individual human beings in a culture and a politics that itself tries to pretend it isn’t there. We all are exhausted from publicly playing along like everything that you see wrong with society is actually just fine. Yet all that’s wrong is right there in the book. Kill Dick is not an antithesis to a Holy book but a book of what the stories of Jesus’s miracles would look like today- only without Jesus there.

Or is he there? Meaning: is Kill Dick a more accurate depiction of what transformation really is? It’s not glamorous, it’s fucked up on the way there, and no one really sees the change, it just is- like the many bodies that precious Royal-Lee kneels over, wondering if they have indeed OD’d- can you tell? Or is the transformation so private that it is between the characters and Jesus, and we have no business in judging how they get there and what it looks like. Besides, what are you the reader doing about people silently dying in the streets, or anything that you can say “aww that’s awful” before you swipe away? Kill Dick inadvertently asks you to see your judgement, and asks “how about you” without judgement cause it’s a just novel…right? Maybe it is a Holy book after all.

‘A terrible beauty,’ is the phrase I think of every time I look at an LA sunset that is like a darkened rainbow made so by the pollution that hangs in the air. LA is America’s terrible beauty, and America is the hope of democracy’s terrible beauty and Kill Dick is the art that comes from almost unthinkable pain stemmed from that empire of capitalistic democracy- what a terrible beauty.

This book’s terrible beauty is a representation of all the pain that has brought all of us here- the drive of every form of addiction: from Oxy, to buying vintage Continentals, to power, to chasing after the perfect image which is the terrible beauty of all of the above. Kill Dick is the pain swirling in a sea of confusion and love and loneliness and desperation to feel connected to something deeper that maybe we only get on the other side of death. But the feeling you get at the end of this book is that maybe, just maybe after we destroy the Dicks of our addictions we can still find that connection on this side, in life. That would be a wonderful beauty.

[Michael]

DNF.

[Sophia Eck · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kill Dick by Luke Goebel has everything that makes up L.A. as it is derogatorily known, and a lot of what makes the worst parts of humanity that we know of, now more than ever, to be despicably common to humanity.

Crude, corrupt, greedy, addicted, and unabashed; That sums up the qualities of about everyone that NYU dropout Susie is surrounded by, alongside other numerous accusations that could potentially be volleyed against them in a court of law. Allegedly.

Strung out and strung along, our main protagonist Susie is, both voluntarily and involuntarily, tangentially involved in countless conspiracies, secret societies, corrupt operations, fraudulent fronts, drug circles, murder sprees, etc. etc. and they are all bubbling up in her gut and in her real life concurrently like magma in a filling volcano that is quite ready to erupt and cause certain destruction, both en masse and inevitably of its own as well.

Goebel, alongside a lot of cringingly crude and questionably funky moments, inserts a decent amount of satirical and topical societal commentary, which despite the novel being set during the 2016 presidential election, are still quite applicable in our current day, given the many obvious parallels.

This book itself, and a book by a man especially, really isn’t something I would typically expect myself to have been into, but I ultimately found myself repeatedly respecting the novel’s biting commentary, ability to call itself out on its privilege, and the feat of the inclusions of grossness and dark reality not feeling like merely cheap shock factor, a shallow tactic I am finding increasingly common among media these days.

If you are into something with the kooky relationship dynamics of Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash (though admittedly that one is not my favorite), the trippy concocted conspiracies of Kurt Vonnegut (could be deemed hit or miss), and the dark and layered realities occurring under the “Orange Candidate’s” early first term (dreadful) check this one out when it publishes April 14th! Thank you Red Hen Press and @coolgirlsreadingbooks for sending me an early copy <3

[Terrance · Rating 1 out of 5]

Awful. If I had known his connection to Ottessa Moshfegh, I would have never purchased this book. It's as miserable, degraded, and irredeemable as her work. I was drawn in by the idea of a modern L.A. noir, and was immediately turned off by the avalanches of philosophical elitism, laissez faire attitudes of its characters, and solipsism. The review from USA Today claims this is a "love letter to L.A.'s darkness and light." Nope. It's a recorded therapy session of a lunatic and reads as such. I want my twenty-two bucks back.

[Victoria McVicker · Rating 1 out of 5]

What an overblown attempt to cover as much ground as possible. Way overwritten and just plain boring. This writing style and plot construction is not for me. I gave it 25% and decided life is too short for this kind of crappy read.

[Lennie · Rating 1 out of 5]

I was wondering why this had such a high goodreads rating then looked and most of the 5 star reviews are from accounts that have ONLY read/reviewed this book. Do with that what you will….

Ugh. There were a lot of things I didn’t like about this book but I’ll start with the obvious: it’s a poor BEE knockoff (and this is coming from someone who has been jokingly referring to their own novel project as “less than one”)

There’s a certain kind of male writing that’s both overconfident and deeply disconnected from meaning. Goebel writes declaratively about his topics without transforming or even really considering them in a deeper way. He constantly references fascism, addiction, nazism, as if mentioning this things will just inherently imbue the work with meaning, or transform him from guy tapping on laptop into literary voice. Unfortunately, mentioning a bunch of philosophers does not make a work interesting, and usually it’s there to distract from the lack of real thought or thesis. There’s an emptiness at the heart of this book, hidden by “high brow” intelligence-signaling and an admittedly interesting concept, which is of course why I picked up the book in the first place. Unfortunately, Goebel shies away from any real interrogation of the issues at hand by making it about his invented cult and the rich people who attend it, while all that the unhoused/addict characters get are grisly descriptions of their murders.

One of the biggest transgressions here is just that the writing is not very good.

“The flowers of fascism” for instance

Or this line:

“Confessionalism is so cliché in this day and age, and addiction stories are limp. This is about so much more. I'm going to dip out into third person, take an asterisks break, and proceed forward in 3D.”

There’s the Play It As It Lays echo with the first —> third shift, but why make it explicit? It feels like the mark of a writer who doesn’t trust the reader to intuit or understand these decisions, (maybe because they’re superficial) or an editor who didn’t have the guts to force the writer to make a decision on POV.

Also idk why everyone is calling this a “fever dream” in the reviews? It’s relentlessly literal and overexplains everything

The characters are lazy mouthpieces, blurring together with the same faux-philosophical ramblings. All the reviews I’ve seen are soooo focused on the nepo baby female character, despite the fact that she’s egregiously flat, and it’s clear that Goebel is much more interested in the male self-insert character…but I guess having a girl character probably sells more books!

I’m just tired of this sort of authoritative, referential writing that lacks any viewpoint of its own and resorts to parroting either banal or edgy political takes(the girl character is always talking about her dad or her pussy). It’s indicative of the fact that everything is being thrown at the wall, and nothing is sticking because there’s nothing at the core.

Also, got to mention the fact that this guy was married to Otessa Moshfegh and still namedrops her as his wife in all the surrounding interviews (the book is literally dedicated to her….) despite the fact that she’s come out to say they’re separated and is no longer involved with him. Looks like art imitates life… Goebels “main character” is also a woman invoked to buff up a mediocre male project

[Morgan]

Thank you so much to the author and Red Hen Press for a physical ARC of Kill Dick, which is out today, 4/14/26!

This book first came on my radar because my faveee Lukas Gage blurbed it. I then come to realize this is Ottessa Moshfegh's husband. I THEN come to realize Luke Goebel co-wrote Eileen the movie (the book is by Moshfegh). The movie was SUCH a great adaptation. He also wrote Causeway with Jennifer Lawrence which I heard is really good but I haven't seen. It's on my list now because I love JLaw!

ANYWAY! This book was a riiiiide. I can tell it was written by someone who writes movies, if that makes sense. There was a lot going on. It was dirty, and gritty, and downright traumatic at times. What I thought was really cool was the POV-shifting from first to third - I enjoyed that and thought it gave us a cool perspective on the unreliability of the narrator.

Real quick synopsis- the book is a literary thriller/satire that takes place in LA in 2016 right before the election. It's a tumultuous time, and addiction, a string of murders, and rich guy corruption added to it sure don't help. Our main character, Susie, is a little bit too close to all of it. We follow Susie through the literal ups and downs of LA at this time where everything is going awry. The writing style is very stream-of-conscious and anxiety-inducing, so strap in!

[Dorkst3r · Rating 4 out of 5]

I received Kill Dick through a Goodreads giveaway sponsored by the author and publisher.

This is not a book I would normally pick up, so I wasn't sure I would like it at all. The writing is very quick to hit you - raw, a little chaotic, and not exactly easy. I won't lie, it took me a while to get used to the style, and there were times when I had to slow down and reread parts just to fully absorb what the author was doing.
What I liked most was the difference it made. It does not try to follow a standard structure or to make things easy for the reader, and I quite respected that. It feels bold and unapologetic, as if the author had written exactly what he wanted without any attempt to water down the material.
There were also moments and images that lingered with me after I finished the book, which I think is always a good sign. Even when it was a little confusing or uncomfortable, it kept my attention, and I found myself thinking about it afterwards. All that said, it is not a light or easy read, and I can imagine that it is not for everyone.
If you're someone who prefers simple narrative, this may be a little difficult. But if you're open to something different and don't mind a book that slows you down and makes you think, it might be worth trying.

#KillDick #RedHenPress #LukeGoebel

[Andy Weston · Rating 3 out of 5]

The novel’s central character is Susie, a privileged adolescent heavily into drugs who studies in New York City or lounges around her family’s LA pool. At time, the narrative switches to other key characters, Phil, Susie’s university professor, who is searching for his twin brother, and Royal-Lee, Susie’s trans friend.

With aspects of a crime thriller, set around the opioid epidemic, this is a keenly observed parody of contemporary literature. Its works particularly well in its first half, but loses its way when it becomes a bit too clever for its own good.

[Gina · Rating 3 out of 5]

Where am I? WHO am I and WTF did I just read?

I had to take a moment to formulate my thoughts on this novel because it is a lot to unpack. The writing style is different; not bad, just different. Someone else referenced that it seemed like a fever dream, but I felt like I was watching someone's crazy trip unfold before my eyes and couldn't look away or stop watching although many times I definitely wanted to. The core topic of addiction and over consumption is raw and unforgiving, and there is a serious storyline somewhere in the mix of all the rants and tangents. You follow two main characters throughout the book, watching their behaviors and addictions unleash an emotional beating on your brain. The story is also following a string of murders through the main character's lives. Lots of back and forth. Like I said in the beginning, it is a lot to unpack and hard to stay focused on.

The writing style is NOT for everyone, or even many. It is reminiscent of Kill Bill or Pulp Fiction to me. Quirky, soap box rants and LOTS of words; too many unnecessary words consumed so many chapters, making the storyline hard to follow. At times I literally said out loud, WTF am I listening to? With that being said, the narrator was fantastic in delivering ALL THOSE WORDS.

If one word sums up my feeling about this novel it would be EXHAUSTING. I need a nap.

[Matthew Harby Conforti · Rating 4 out of 5]

4/ A pulpy satire with some real style to ground it. This book is a reflection of our times, for better or worse. I enjoyed it but it will be love/hate for most readers. Susie is a perfect narrator to spark discussion and dissension and the world she inhabits is equal parts bougie and grimey and fully bleached out by the sunshine. For me, Goebel sells a zany caper with the style and voice; he channels a bit of Bret Easton Ellis, a pinch of Joan Didion, and a dollop of Tarantino (though I wish we went a bit more full boar here). Lots of polemic-y passages from characters all over the modern spectrum. I liked the cartoon aspect but would've enjoyed a bit more depiction of some of the wilder things that happen off the page. I think I'll need to read it a second time as it seems like you'd pick up on even more the second time around. You'll know pretty early if it's for you or not.

[Kerri Schlottman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow.

[Meghan Buchman · Rating 1 out of 5]

Take this review with a grain a salt as I didn't finish the story.
It was torture. I imagine the author, sitting in a dar room, cigarette smoldering to his left, thinking of ways to make this an intellectual art piece.
Absolute rubbish. Too overly detailed and not enough story.
I hate to not finish a book but water boarding myself would have been less cruel.

[L Baldwin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Knocked off a star bc there are some internal monologues that felt redundant & the writing was maybe too Bret Easton Ellis-y at points, BUT damn if that ending didn’t stick. Wait, have I been moved?

[Tomi]

isn't it a bit of a conflict of interest to have ottessa moshfegh (his wife) blurb this book?

[Douglas Perry · Rating 2 out of 5]

Luke Goebel’s novel “Kill Dick” is both playful and grotesque.

The story revolves around a series of brutal murders in Los Angeles motel rooms, the bodies desecrated, with nipples glued to eyelids, blood soaked into mattresses. In one case the victim’s head is missing.

It’s so traumatic that our narrator – 19-year-old college dropout Susie Vogelman, who’s caught up in the carnage – can’t tell it in a straightforward manner.

Much of the novel is written in the third person, but only after Susie introduces herself and identifies what you’re reading as a “novelization” of what happened in her life during the period of “the killings,” when she was mostly stoned out of her gourd.

“I turned it into art,” she tells us, adding:

“In order to craft this, I need to include multiple points of view, inviting the characters into the story, wrestling with their metaphysics as best I can.”

This is rather clever. We get the unreliable narrator without any need for the suspension of disbelief that’s a requirement of any first-person novel with it’s-happening-now action. (In “Farewell, My Lovely,” for example, is iconic P.I. Philip Marlowe narrating into, say, a strapped-on Dictaphone as he’s getting beaten unconscious?)

As it turns out, everything about “Kill Dick” is unreliable: the narrator, the murders, even one of the featured “blurbs” selling the novel. (“If this book were any better, I’d cut my own head off,” Booker Prize-shortlisted author Ottessa Moshfegh enthuses. Not mentioned: Moshfegh and Goebel are married.)

Goebel has come up with something strange and memorable here.

Sometimes that’s good. Sometimes it’s just ... strange.

“Kill Dick” (the title’s probably a double entendre, but, as with much of the story, who knows?) opens with Southern California’s famous Santa Ana winds, a metaphor of sorts, blowing through L.A.’s parched, always-conflagration-ready hills and into Hollywood, “sifting buttermilk-pancake dust up through Beverly Hills and Bel Air.”

The delectable powder lands on Susie, who’s stretched out by the pool at her parents’ swank home in Brentwood.

Susie is back at her parents’ place because her roommate at New York University died of an overdose, sending Susie into a tailspin. But mom and dad are no comfort, and so Susie tumbles into drug addiction – just as a serial killer in the city starts targeting addicts.

Susie reveals the plot slowly, enjoying painting us a Daliesque picture of both herself and Los Angeles. The sun sets “like a departing god” here. While lounging by the pool in a designer bikini, Susie gazes down at herself and notes her body is “almost transparent but leaden, like tanned solid glass.”

The mystery of the murders is weaved around cultural criticism of America today: commercialism, voyeurism, sexual confusion, ideological conflict. There are also nostalgic (yes, that’s the right word here) nods to ugly L.A. and celebrity sensations at the end of the 20th century: Natalie Wood’s death, Rodney King’s beating, the O.J. Simpson trial.

Susie muses throughout that maybe the serial killer was trying to overcome being a narcotized slave to advertisers and political flim-flammers, that killing people “was the only way he could change the nature of his own reality in a significant enough manner so that he was able to transcend the realm of soul-obedience and irrelevance that the world determined for him.”

Got that?

When she’s not being so philosophical, Susie rages at her conspiracy-minded, largely absent father, a lawyer for the Sicklers (a fictional stand-in for the Sacklers, the wealthy Big Pharma family that brought America the opioid epidemic) and wonders if he’s the killer.

The plot thickens thanks to Peter, one of Susie’s NYU professors, who also ends up in L.A., in his case to search for his addict twin brother. Peter grew up in Portland, where he ran with environmental activists who later “would turn into loser liberals, distracted by race, gender, sexuality – any category of victimhood the DNC could weaponize – while the party kept dodging pharma, genocidal war and poison food, its leaders stuffing their faces with veal and pills.”

But this is Susie’s show. Goebel, who grew up in Portland, has a lot to say about the America we live in, and it can get annoying. This is probably not a guy you want to sit next to at a dinner party. And yet, when he filters these views through preternaturally observant, messed-up Susie, a modern-day Joan Didion-lite, it kind of works.

“She picked up her phone to post a photo of her armpit on Instagram – there was a gritty ingrown hair growing among pilly dots of yesterday’s antiperspirant,” Goebel writes as Susie, who’s writing about herself from a studied remove. “Isn’t that the world right now? The unkempt armpit of the spoiled and suffering? She was a genius. She tried to take the selfie but the phone slipped through her fingers – the tanning oil.”

Where does this all lead? Goebel eventually returns to those scouring Santa Ana winds, if that helps.

[Frederik · Rating 3 out of 5]

Luke Goebel is a smart and talented writer, and his searing, sharply-observed and often darkly funny broadside against the opioid addiction crisis - with Dick Sickler, the titular Dick, standing in for the real-life Sacklers who own oxycontin manufacture Purdue Pharma. I had the opportunity to hear him speak during a panel on conspiracies and secret societies at the LA Times Festival of Books, and I was very much struck by the autobiographical dimensions of the book. Although fiction, it's clear that there is personally motivated anger against the pharmaceutical companies, the wealthy elites, and the so-called "liberal" system whose hypocrisy dehumanizes addicts.

Unfortunately, I didn't find the book as compelling as I hoped it would be. He's a very good and even witty writer, but I often found that his style got in the way of his storytelling. I wasn't so bothered by the way in which he switches points of view from first to third person, even occasionally breaking the fourth wall - though more arbitrary than postmodern, he doesn't do this so often that it becomes a distraction. It's not clear what benefit changing POVs offers, but ok, fine, it's an artistic choice. What did prove a bit of a slog to get through was how often his characters' interior lives felt more like treading water than stream-of-consciousness. What plot there is, including one involving an elite secret cabal called the Church of the White Illumination, is drowned in strangely repetitive characterizations. It's like staring at a person's portrait on the gallery wall: it can be fascinating for a while until the static quality of the portrait

Altogether, I found the overall book to have an oddly abstracting effect for a topic that, in concept, should deliver a roundhouse kick in the feels. The comparison that comes to mind is how I felt after watching the harrowing Requiem for a Dream; it's not how I felt after reading Kill Dick, and yet I feel like I should actually experience something more than just a cerebral sympathy.

Would I read another book by this author? Despite Kill Dick not quite landing as it should (for me), yes.

[talissa marquesoni · Rating 5 out of 5]

Comecei Kill Dick esperando um thriller literário caótico e terminei com um dos livros mais memoráveis que li este ano.
(esse livro não é bem um thriller e espere por momentos chatos)

O caos existe e ele nunca é gratuito. A narrativa parece querer te desorientar porque o mundo retratado (o nosso) está completamente doente. Aos poucos, tudo vai encontrando lugar e você percebe que por trás da violência, do humor absurdo e das situações quase surreais existe uma crítica muito consciente à epidemia de opioides, ao privilégio e às estruturas de poder que lucram com o sofrimento alheio. (Nada diferente da realidade)

O que mais me conquistou foi que Luke Goebel não trata seus personagens como peças de um discurso. Eles erram, irritam, fazem escolhas questionáveis, mas continuam profundamente humanos. A Susie, em especial, foi uma protagonista que eu não consegui tirar da cabeça. (E também é narradora e nada confiável, então eu me irritei muito com ela)

Também gostei de como o livro consegue ser engraçado em momentos completamente desconfortáveis, graças à narrativa da Susie. E o humor não diminui o peso da história, muito pelo contrário, torna tudo ainda mais perturbador.

É um livro que exige atenção, e em vários momentos eu precisei desacelerar, voltar algumas páginas e confiar que o autor sabia exatamente onde estava me levando. Valeu a pena. Quando terminei, senti vontade de reler imediatamente porque percebi que muita coisa ganha um significado completamente diferente sabendo onde a história vai chegar.

Kill Dick não é um livro feito para agradar todo mundo. É provocador, exagerado, violento e, às vezes, desconcertante. Mas justamente por isso acabou sendo uma das leituras mais marcantes do meu ano.

Recomendo para quem gosta de livros que misturam humor ácido, crítica social e personagens moralmente complicados. Não espere uma narrativa linear ou confortável, a história confia no leitor e recompensa quem aceita embarcar no caos.

Se você gosta de terminar um livro e continuar pensando nele por dias ou de sentir vontade de reler imediatamente (igual eu) para enxergar tudo sob outra perspectiva, há grandes chances de Kill Dick funcionar para você também.

Só vale conferir os gatilhos antes de começar, porque o livro aborda temas pesados de forma bastante gráfica e pode não ser uma leitura adequada para todos os momentos.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kill Dick completely exceeded my expectations. I picked it up thinking I was getting a dark thriller, but it turned out to be so much more than that. It's one of those rare books that entertains you while also making you think about the world around you.

What impressed me most was how vividly the author brings Los Angeles to life. The city feels like a character in its own right—glamorous, chaotic, and full of contradictions. Every scene felt immersive, and I could easily picture the world the characters were navigating.

Susie Vogelman is a fascinating protagonist. She's complex, intelligent, and deeply aware of the reality surrounding her, even when she's struggling to find her place within it. Her journey kept me invested from beginning to end. I found myself thinking about her long after I finished the book. The supporting characters are equally memorable, especially Peter Holiday. The dynamic between the characters creates a constant sense of tension and unpredictability that kept me turning pages. I never quite knew where the story was headed, which made the reading experience even more engaging.

What really sets this novel apart is its sharp social commentary. The story explores wealth, addiction, power, and privilege in a way that feels both relevant and thought-provoking. Rather than preaching, it trusts readers to draw their own conclusions, which I appreciated.

The writing is ambitious, confident, and full of memorable observations. There were many passages that made me stop and reflect before continuing. The author clearly has a unique voice and isn't afraid to tackle difficult subjects with honesty and insight.

By the time I reached the final pages, I realized this was one of those books that stays with you. It's bold, intelligent, emotionally resonant, and unlike anything else I've read recently. If you enjoy literary thrillers that combine compelling characters with meaningful themes, I highly recommend giving Kill Dick a read.

[Ultimate World · Rating 5 out of 5]

Book Review: Kill Dick by Luke Goebel

Kill Dick is a blistering, darkly comic descent into privilege, addiction, and moral rot, delivered with a voice that is as fearless as it is unsettling. Luke Goebel crafts a modern literary thriller that refuses comfort, forcing readers to sit with the consequences of wealth, complicity, and systems designed to exploit the vulnerable.

At the center is Susie Vogelman, a nineteen-year-old adrift in Los Angeles excess—pill-fueled, insulated by money, and numbed by a life that should feel charmed but instead feels hollow. Her detachment is shattered when a series of violent murders targeting addicts ripples through the city, and the distance between Susie’s insulated world and the suffering outside it collapses. As headlines begin to implicate her father’s opioid empire—and by extension, Susie herself—the novel sharpens into an indictment of inherited power and willful blindness.

Enter Peter Holiday, a disgraced academic running a grotesquely clever rehab scam. His collision with Susie is electric and disturbing, less a partnership than a mutual freefall. Together, they navigate a landscape where every institution—family, academia, medicine, recovery—feels corrupted beyond repair. Goebel’s satire cuts deep here, exposing how exploitation often masquerades as care, and how easy it is to profit from pain when you’re protected by money and myth.

What sets Kill Dick apart is its razor-sharp prose and moral ferocity. Goebel doesn’t moralize; he dissects. The humor is pitch-black, the violence purposeful, and the characters painfully human in their selfishness, fear, and desperation. The novel constantly challenges the reader to question where survival ends and self-destruction begins—and who gets punished, and who gets protected, when everything falls apart.

Bold, confrontational, and disturbingly relevant, Kill Dick is not an easy read, but it’s a necessary one. It’s a novel for readers who appreciate literary fiction that takes risks, refuses tidy resolutions, and dares to stare directly at the machinery of modern exploitation without blinking.

[Sunshine · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is not gentle in any way. It grabs you and pulls you through something raw and uncomfortable. Kill Dick feels wild and harsh but also painfully honest. It shows a story piece by piece instead of guiding you through it. I felt drawn in the whole time even when it made me uneasy. Susie Vogelman comes across as someone who has everything yet is falling apart inside. She drifts through her days in a haze of pills and avoidance. Her life looks secure on the outside but it is empty at the core. Watching her face reality felt like seeing something unravel in slow motion. It is hard to turn away even as it gets darker.

Peter adds another layer of chaos. He is reckless and controlling while running a rehab scheme that sounds strange but also believable. Their connection is unhealthy and intense in a way that keeps you locked in. The Los Angeles setting adds to the feeling. It shines on the surface but there is decay underneath it all. The writing is bold and cutting and sometimes feels close to the edge but it is always purposeful. It digs into addiction and wealth and the systems that let damage continue. What stayed with me most is how it shows that no one is fully innocent. It makes you sit with that discomfort and question where survival ends and self destruction begins. The story is harsh and unsettling yet everything feels meaningful. It left me feeling shaken and aware.

[Jay Duenas · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 ⭐️ Completely different from my normal reads, but absolutely aligned with my views. Such a gold mine of truths about our reality- ones we need to hear. This book is a conversation starter for discussions we should be having, especially in our current climate. I love how aggressive it is in naming the things people avoid- the things people probably already think but refuse to say, or allow to happen because they feel powerless to stop them.

The satirical wit is something else. Quotes like this had me laughing while also making me think:

“New Yorkers were mostly stupid and pretentious, practically glued to the guardrail of commercial groupthink and liberal brainwashing. In LA at least people didn’t dare expose themselves. They smiled and ate the blinis and risked nothing, waiting to be entertained, talking about who they knew or what they’d seen or who they collected.”

Witty on the surface, but the kind of thing that can fuel an hour-long conversation if you let it. There are a lot of moments like that in here.

This book puts into perspective how broken our world is- but honestly, it also gave me the drive to do better, at least within the little space I take up. Bravo 👏🏽

[Matthew Peck · Rating 3 out of 5]

(Acquired via Goodreads Giveaways). An oft-gruesome social satire skewering L.A. materialism, conceptual art, and 21st-century America in general. Goebel's book is set in the lead-up to the 2016 election, and among the full hierarchy of people enmeshed in the opiate crisis - at the top, the Sicklers (based on a certain real empire of pain) and at the bottom, the victims and denizens of Skid Row and rehab centers. It's all narrated, in a disorienting mix of first- and third-person, by the daughter of the Sickler's personal attorney, aspiring artist and Oxy addict Susie Fogelman.

There is genuine pain and anger roiling under the surface of this book, but as a coherent novel, it didn't quite work for me. The storytelling is too meta and careless about revealing future events for it to function as a suspenseful or well-paced story, but it's not quite daring or weird enough to reach Pynchon or Delillo territory. Like the film "Eddington", it leans on names and trendy references as a flimsy stand-in for timely commentary. But also like "Eddington": it's a work by an obviously talented person with a bravura, bloody climax, and some people will love it.

[Leona Veldt]

Kill Dick is a blistering, unrelenting descent into the moral rot beneath Los Angeles privilege. This is not a book that asks for your comfort—it demands your attention. The novel’s power lies in its ferocious intelligence and refusal to soften its vision. Susie Vogelman is a haunting protagonist: insulated by wealth, numbed by addiction, and slowly awakening to the violence underwriting her existence. The plot moves like a fever spike—erratic, brutal, and impossible to ignore—while the prose remains sharp and controlled. The satire cuts deep, exposing how addiction is monetized, exploited, and conveniently ignored by those who profit most. Peter Holiday’s storyline is equally disturbing, offering a grotesque mirror to Susie’s world. Kill Dick is fearless, confrontational, and wildly ambitious—a literary thriller that earns every ounce of its darkness.

[Isabela Tanashian · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve never read anything like this. I ordered a copy because the subject matter intrigued me and it did not disappoint. What begins as a fever dream through the lens of one young woman’s ultra-sheltered, opiate-addled psyche quickly devolves into a surreal, satirical, violent (yet beautiful) spectacle that exposes the corporate systems and injustices responsible for the opioid crisis and its consequences in America; all against the ominously sunny backdrop of Los Angeles. The novel centers around Susie Vogelman, a privileged young painkiller addict whose simultaneous apathy and relentless “performance” of self-awareness are both funny and demoralizing. Spoiler: “Dick” refers to Richard Sickler, the king of the opioid empire himself. I like what Luke did there.

[Chentan 01 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kill Dick is a bold, dark, and unforgettable literary thriller that pulls readers into the chaotic underbelly of Los Angeles. 🌴🔥 With sharp satire, gripping suspense, and deeply flawed yet fascinating characters, the novel explores addiction, privilege, corruption, and the hidden systems that keep power intact. Susie Vogelman’s journey from a sheltered life of excess to a dangerous confrontation with harsh realities is both compelling and unsettling. 😮💊

The story masterfully blends mystery and social commentary, keeping readers hooked as shocking secrets and brutal crimes unravel. Peter Holiday adds another layer of intrigue, bringing complexity, dark humor, and moral ambiguity to an already explosive narrative. 🎭🔍

Raw, intelligent, and emotionally intense, Kill Dick challenges readers to question wealth, responsibility, and survival in a world built on exploitation. If you enjoy literary thrillers with sharp social criticism and unforgettable characters, this book is a must-read. ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐📖🔥

[Keith Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not going to lie this was almost my first DNF and ended up being a 5 star for me!

Incredibly thought provoking. Very erratic main character perspective that I initially completely misunderstood, nothing like a character in a book to give you a reality check. Just because I didn’t understand her for a second doesn’t mean she wasn’t understandable. Okay I’m rambling.

Great read. Super intentional writing from this author. Enjoyed the ride.