Susie Vogelman is young, beautiful, loaded, and completely and hopelessly addicted to OxyContin. After her roommate overdoses on prescription drugs and dies, Susie drops out of NYU. We meet her as she’s living in the sprawling Los Angeles mansion that belongs to her father — corporate counsel to the Sickler family, a thinly veiled stand-in for the Sacklers, of Purdue Pharma fame. While our protagonist Susie is dealing with the early stages of her own opioid addiction, the city of Los Angeles is dealing with a string of horrific murders, referred to simply as “the killings,” which are targeting opioid addicts, largely living on the streets. The murderer — or murderers, as the case may be — is killing addicts and mutilating their corpses beyond recognition: beheading them, cutting their bodies in half, affixing their nipples to their eyelids. The killings proceed in the background of Susie’s story, terrorizing the most abject corners of the city as this sordid tale of wealth, addiction, and corruption unfolds in the fore.
I read Luke Goebel’s Kill Dick (2026, Red Hen Press) in the weeks immediately following the brutal murder and maiming of Rob and Michele Reiner at the hands, allegedly, of their son Nick. That family’s nightmarish story was top of mind for me as I devoured Kill Dick over the course of a few days. The book is fast-paced and propulsive. I was compelled straight away by the entitled, drug-addicted, aspiring painter protagonist, Susie. As the plot unfolded, the Reiner family tragedy wouldn’t leave my mind, not only because it was dominating the news cycle then, but also because of how closely their story of drug addiction, wealth, privilege, and ultimately, terrible violence, mirrored the themes of this novel.
Like Susie and the countless victims of “the killings,” Nick Reiner was battling addiction when he allegedly killed and maimed his own parents as the result of what we might assume to be a drug-induced psychosis. Much like Nick Reiner resented his father and his success in Hollywood, Susie resents hers for his work representing the Sicklers and their impossible-to-overstate role in the opioid epidemic. The way the Reiners’ story echoes in Kill Dick is quite eerie. “I fantasized about bashing my parents’ skulls in with the gardening implement,” Susie confesses at one point. At another, she refers to “the Menendez twins who ended the decade and their parents’ lives in a Beverly Hills mansion worth fifteen million.” In both stories, drugs lead to violence, leading to death. Bloody, horrific deaths. Parricide is a unifying theme.
Both the Reiner family tragedy and Kill Dick are emblematic Los Angeles horror stories — warped by money, fame, and influence. Kill Dick, in voice and theme both, reads like a Bret Easton Ellis novel. The author clearly drew inspiration from The Shards and American Psycho, among other of his books. Even the repetition of the generic term “the killings” (always in scare quotes), is reminiscent of how Ellis ominously refers to his serial killer character in The Shards as “The Trawler.” Much like Ellis, the writing here can feel slightly removed, keeping the character’s consciousness just out of reach for the reader. There’s a certain intimacy that’s missing. Instead, the story is plot-heavy and action-packed, which can feel like a refreshing departure for a work of literary fiction.
Also in line with Ellis, Goebel seems to be very concerned with the issue of empire. In Ellis’ 2011 essay for The Daily Beast, “Notes on Charlie Sheen and the End of Empire,” Ellis argues that American culture and its participants can be divided into Empire (Anderson Cooper, Bruce Springsteen, Fran Lebowitz, Madonna) and Post-Empire (John Mayer, Kanye West, Eminem, the Kardashians). Goebel too, is obsessed with the fall of the American empire (“post-America,” he calls it), as well as with the would-be emperors who rule in this post-empire world. He refers not only to a thinly veiled version of the Sacklers, but to other members of the ruling class, including disguised versions of Jeffrey Epstein’s cabal and a church not too dissimilar from the Church of Scientology.
Los Angeles has a particular type of dark, seedy underbelly that I don’t believe exists in the same way in other cities. In addition to the Reiner family, I’m reminded, reading this book, of a young woman — also dealing with addiction — whom I met a couple years ago in rehab. Originally from Southern Illinois, she’d moved to Los Angeles and found work as a cocktail waitress for an underground poker ring. She quickly became close friends with her fellow waitress, one of whom was then brutally murdered in her own apartment before being sawed in half and stuffed in a fridge at the hands of some brutal Angeleno killers. Right away, my friend’s family summoned her back to the Midwest, far away from the dark, sinister energy brewing in LA. Addiction. Murder of the most heinous variety. Without access to our phones or the internet, she and I would sit together in the common area, glued to the TV, waiting for any updates on her friend’s case. All of these cases — my friend’s, the Reiners, the murders in Bret Easton Ellis’ oeuvre, and “the killings” in Kill Dick — all have a distinctly Angeleno flavor to them.
Goebel’s writing is self-referential in style, even outwardly acknowledging the fact that the narration switches frequently between first and third person. “I hate to talk about my addiction like this in first person,” Susie explains:
It’s not that I can’t tolerate the truth about the addict I was, it’s just such an oversaturated genre. 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 into third person, take an asterisks break, and proceed forward in 3-D.
Maybe this is a matter of personal taste — I do love an addiction memoir —but I found the switching of perspectives a bit distracting, with the strongest chapters being told from Susie’s first person point of view. While yes, this is a tale about far more than one girl’s addiction narrative, I believe it could’ve been told all from her perspective, or at the very least, Goebel’s writing process didn’t need to be spelled out so plainly for the reader, taking us out of the story, if just for a moment.
The subject matter of Kill Dick is dark and profoundly disturbing. And yet the writing, packed with pop culture references and rich descriptions of LA, keeps it readable and highly entertaining. In addition to its merits as a serial murder mystery, the novel is highly political. While not concerned with capital-P politics, it offers an incisive criticism of America’s ruling class, in all its greed, corruption, and the surface-level politeness that conceals a world of violence. Neither conservative nor liberal, the political thesis of the book is centered on a critique of the elites at the head of industry, government, the church, and civil life in America. “These people would turn into loser liberals,” Goebel writes, “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.”
Decidedly unconcerned with identity politics, Goebel instead points his critique at more foundational economic and political power structures. He draws parallels, in the book, with Jeffrey Epsteinian hazing rites. He writes:
In sum total, was the world really owned and run by occult hermeticism, holding perverted orgies like this, like people suspected, in top-secret conspiring societies, who’d taken, a thousand or more years ago, false knowledge to the extreme? Was it all really just sex rituals, entrapment, liberation through perversity and shared excess?
Just as I was reminded of the work of Ellis while reading Kill Dick, I similarly couldn’t stop thinking about the podcast True Anon, and even wondered if Goebel had been listening to the show as he worked on this book. Like Kill Dick, the podcast, which is hosted by Brace Belden and Liz Franczak, defies conventional political categorization. Instead, it takes aim at the neoliberal establishment, the intelligence community, and the conspiracies they orchestrate in order to maintain societal power and control.
There is a strong ideological bent to this novel, often stated in explicit terms, particularly for a novelistic work. Personally, I found myself nodding along to these passages, in complete political alignment with the position the book seems to take on the ruling class and their approach to running institutions and dictating cultural mores. One critique of mine, though, is that Goebel has a tendency to get up on a soapbox, stretching certain plot points to assert his worldview in long soliloquies. These tend to be well written and compelling in their own right, though sometimes they feel a little forced, as if the reader can see the inner workings of Goebel’s writing process, in which these essay-like excerpts don’t always feel completely organic. In spite of that — or perhaps by way of explanation — Kill Dick is an ambitious novel, tackling a vast array of our society’s deepest issues and most entrenched power structures through the lens of addiction and violence. It captivated me, both in plot and in language, and kept my attention through the very end. As Goebel himself explains in the text, this is not an addiction story in the traditional sense, but one that seeks to elucidate some of the systemic harm being done at the highest levels of our post-empire society while never failing to entertain the reader.
Emma Burger is a Chicago-based writer, originally from New York City. She is the author of two novels, Little Rich Kids (2025) and Spaghetti for Starving Girls (2021). You can find her work in Hobart, X-R-A-Y Lit, and The Republic of Letters, at emmaburgerwrites.com, or on Substack at emmakaiburger.substack.com. She is an essays editor at Zona Motel.
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