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Kill Dick: A Novel
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ACCLAIMED AUTHOR OF
FOURTEEN STORIES, NONE OF THEM ARE YOURS
, CO-WRITER OF
EILEEN
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.
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.
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Expected publication April 14, 2026
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About the author
Luke B. Goebel
5 books91 followersLuke 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.
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.
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February 1, 2026Kill 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.
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.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
I’ll admit I wanted to read this book because it is written by Ottessa Moshfegh’s husband, and I believe that Moshfegh would not tolerate being married to a bad writer. I was correct.
This novel portrays the psyche of a woman named Susie who has been chewed up by the events of her life and is in the process of grieving while trying to continue living. I am wary of how male writers portray women’s inner lives, though Goebel did a fantastic job. The portrayal of Southern California made it the perfect setting for this satirical thriller. I couldn’t help but think of Moshfegh’s prose while reading this book. They share a kind of sharpness to the storytelling, like a sort of detachment that is more enticing than it is off-putting.
I think Moshfegh fans will love this book. It has the best of what makes Moshfegh’s writing enjoyable to me, with an experimental spirit and flair. I also think they are different enough as writers and storytellers that readers who perhaps didn’t connect with Moshfegh’s writing should try out this novel.
Thank you to NetGalley and Red Hen Press for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.
Review of advance copy received from Author
A "White Noise" for our age.
I am proud to have edited this book w/ Mr. Goebel! From reading the first few pages many years ago, I remember being impressed by the prose, enthralled with the voice and characterizations, and wondering "who the hell is this guy, and how is he able to get away with this??"
I'm biased, obviously, but I love this book! The first draft I read was already great and I think it's only improved exponentially with time and revision. There's nothing else quite like it in the literary space these days. While working on this novel, we talked a lot of "Day of the Locust," "Play It As It Lays," and, yes, Bret (I also saw a lot of Pynchon & Hunter S. Thompson in it myself).
It was an honor to have had a part in re-shaping this book and bringing it to the world. Luke, himself, is quite the character and it was a hoot to work with him. I really believe in this as a work of art and I'm excited to see what life it takes in publication. I hope it finds its audience!
I am proud to have edited this book w/ Mr. Goebel! From reading the first few pages many years ago, I remember being impressed by the prose, enthralled with the voice and characterizations, and wondering "who the hell is this guy, and how is he able to get away with this??"
I'm biased, obviously, but I love this book! The first draft I read was already great and I think it's only improved exponentially with time and revision. There's nothing else quite like it in the literary space these days. While working on this novel, we talked a lot of "Day of the Locust," "Play It As It Lays," and, yes, Bret (I also saw a lot of Pynchon & Hunter S. Thompson in it myself).
It was an honor to have had a part in re-shaping this book and bringing it to the world. Luke, himself, is quite the character and it was a hoot to work with him. I really believe in this as a work of art and I'm excited to see what life it takes in publication. I hope it finds its audience!
Review of advance copy received from Author
This is the best book I’ve read in… about ever. As a family medicine physician I cut my teeth during the start of the opioid epidemic. I was on the other side of the prescription pad for decades during the horrific years of treating human emotional suffering with opioids. Luke not only tugs on your heart strings but pulls your heart right out of your chest and puts it on the table demanding you to examine who you are and what you care about. And all the while he manages to make this process so enjoyable, you can’t wait to get back to the book and don’t want it to end. He’s there with you in the depths of human reflection delivering gorgeous sentences examining what it is to be human and the role we all play in our own lives. Sentences that will stay with you for a long time. He not only makes us think intellectually about it all, but he allows us to emotionally experience the deep love that truly underlies human suffering.
Review of advance copy received from Author
Currently on page 90 and grappling with the reality that the more I read the closer I am to finishing the book and I do not want this book to end. I have become enveloped in the world Luke so brilliantly created and my attachment and affinity towards the characters is a true testament to his genius. People will be talking about this book for as long as there is language. And even once humans wipe ourselves out, the plants will be communicating about this book through electrical signals. A must-read for anyone who has ever felt anything ever.
Review of advance copy
This man is a true prodigy of literary dexterity. He captures the depths underneath the superficial veneer of Los Angeles in such a blunt yet nuanced way. In reading this novel, I feel the author speaking both to, and about me - a woman navigating the inner and outer landscape of life here in the city of angels. Bravo to this work which evokes the beauty and melancholy and apathy of this wonderful and horrible city.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
I got this as an ARC and am working on a full review to be published soon. This is a hell of a read. Pynchon and Hunter S Thompson and William Burroughs and Stanley Kubrick and David Lynch. But in the end all Luke Goebel. All beauty and ugliness. All dreadful and reassuring. All like nothing else I have ever read.
Review of advance copy received from Author
This is one of those books that lingers after you’ve set it down. The characters stay with you, and the world Luke has created continues to unfold in your mind, unsettling, vivid, and impossible to forget. So many lines in the book are so finely crafted that they stop you mid-page, asking to be read again.
Review of advance copy received from Author
Luke has an ability to describe the scene with more than just portrayal of the visual but also the senses, urgency, anxiety, intoxication. I feel like we are from the same generation. I relate more than I care to admit to this book. Am I ok? Lol. My favorite book in the last 10 yrs of my life. Definitely would recommend.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
Kill Dick is a fascinating story of addiction and violence, which offers a searing criticism of the ruling elite and the power structures that they govern. Fast paced, entertaining, and packed with pop culture references. This book is giving BEE in the best way!
Review of advance copy received from Author
Just finished Kill Dick by Luke Goebel and OH MY GOD is it great!! This book is an unflinching portrayal of addiction, greed, violence, and redemption. Fast paced and real. Luke does an amazing job making you feel like you’re in this story.
I can’t recommend this book enough!!
I can’t recommend this book enough!!
Review of advance copy
So many lines I want to read over and over, they were that brilliant!
Review of advance copy received from Author
Unsettling, beguiling, and addictive. Goebel writes with a cinematic immediacy that consumes the reader. Reading Kill Dick is a fully immersive experience.
Review of advance copy received from Author
Pulpy, elegiac, sexy, repulsive, conspiratorial, revelatory, pulled from the headlines, ahead of its time, read this book, burn this book.
Review of advance copy received from Author
Luke is an evil genius I can’t get over how good this book is. The text is challenging, expansive, and impossible to put down. Everyone should read this book. 10’s across the board!
Review of advance copy received from Author
Can’t wait to read this! Luke is brilliant force of nature!!
Review of advance copy received from Author
Stunning, gripping, relevant. Five Stars!!
Review of advance copy received from Author
Definitely an eye opener and captivating from paragraph one.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
He had me at Kill Dick. Sharp, provocative, and hypnotized from the very first page.
Review of advance copy received from Author
Fantastic!
Review of advance copy received from Author
This book is SAVAGE. Feral, furious, frighteningly smart. Darkly hilarious.
Luke Goebel doesn’t simply tell a story; he dissects, exposes, and eviscerates. While a work of literary fiction, Kill Dick is also a thriller and satire on the absurdity of obscene wealth, unchecked greed, and moral bankruptcy, laid bare in ways that are as biting as they are funny.
His command of the opioid epidemic — its origins, enablers, and devastating repercussions — is so precise it left me both impressed and intimidated. While the subject matter is heavy and relentless, the delivery is surprisingly approachable, funny, and anchored by characters so engrossing it’s impossible to put down. The depth of research alone is staggering. It’s rare to encounter a book this intellectually rigorous and confrontational that also manages sharp humor and empathy for the human condition.
As I write this, I’m aware I’ll only ever be a fraction as articulate as Goebel himself. There seems to be no subject left un-researched: art, fashion, politics, history… paleontology! Every thread is intentional and woven together with precision.
Dark and sticky. Unflinching and unrelenting. Devastatingly effective. This triumph should be on everyone’s pre-order list.
Luke Goebel doesn’t simply tell a story; he dissects, exposes, and eviscerates. While a work of literary fiction, Kill Dick is also a thriller and satire on the absurdity of obscene wealth, unchecked greed, and moral bankruptcy, laid bare in ways that are as biting as they are funny.
His command of the opioid epidemic — its origins, enablers, and devastating repercussions — is so precise it left me both impressed and intimidated. While the subject matter is heavy and relentless, the delivery is surprisingly approachable, funny, and anchored by characters so engrossing it’s impossible to put down. The depth of research alone is staggering. It’s rare to encounter a book this intellectually rigorous and confrontational that also manages sharp humor and empathy for the human condition.
As I write this, I’m aware I’ll only ever be a fraction as articulate as Goebel himself. There seems to be no subject left un-researched: art, fashion, politics, history… paleontology! Every thread is intentional and woven together with precision.
Dark and sticky. Unflinching and unrelenting. Devastatingly effective. This triumph should be on everyone’s pre-order list.
Review of advance copy
Amazing read!
Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews