Luke Goebel’s psycho-philosophical thriller, Kill Dick (Red Hen, April 2026), invites us to indulge in its titular daydream on the eve of the first Trump presidency. Given the chance to go back, could we defeat the patriarchy and all its necrophiliac subsumptions in one wild act of cathartic violence? I mean, probably not—we’ve since seen Luigi Mangione try that. Goebel’s novel takes us, not to the gritty streets of New York, but rather to LA, the nation’s neural fantasy center, just as Americans are about to make the historic choice. From our present vantage, deep into the second term of the Orange President, we know how it’s all about to go down: the nation is going to choose dick at the polls, a triple or quadruple or quintuple entendre capacious enough to hold the complex weight of our current predicament (we chose a man over a woman; a phallocentric gender regime; a rude, crass dick-in-chief; the interests of the wealthy over the rest, so that most of us, in the end, got dick, so to speak). In returning readers to that fall, to the moment just before we committed to this path, Kill Dick demands we sit with our choices, feel again that awful divergence. The title’s command reminds us that it didn’t have to be this way. Kill dick? We should’ve. The future depended upon it.
Because we didn’t, however, Goebel asks how we can make things right, and he aspires to give us an answer. Although Kill Dick clocks in at under 300 pages, it’s a maximalist novel, an attempt to compress the entirety of contemporary culture, theory, and politics into the seductive shape of a serial killer narrative. Goebel stuffs the thriller, one of the last saleable forms, to the gills with genre tropes from film and fiction. Kill Dick is noir, but it’s also a great (post-)American novel, a portrait of the artist as a young woman, a conspiracy theory, a cult narrative, a muckraker, a bildungsroman, an adjunctroman, a political satire, an existential novel, an LA novel, a theory novel, part Kubrick (Eyes Wide Shut), part Lynch (with twins doubling themselves, we’re back on Mulholland Drive), part Bangles video.
Like The Crying of Lot 49, this book isn’t really about its central mystery. It’s about a vibe, a moment in America. If anything, the murders that punctuate the plot put a spotlight on the necrotic character of US class warfare: a killer is targeting the lowest of the low, society’s outcasts, addicts who are just as likely to overdose on their own, if they haven’t already. To add insult to injury, the killer carves up their bodies, mutilating flesh, displacing everything, gluing nipples to eyelids. Metaphorically, this is what addiction does. It reorients the body, shaking things up, deforming the addict. And yet, in the world of the novel, as in our world, it takes a serial killer to call attention to the real effects of Big Pharma’s evil empire. Why bother to murder the walking dead, when they’re well on their way to doing so themselves? This is the question we might ask of the real-life Sacklers, who were arraigned in Kentucky for OxyContin’s ravaging effects on already blighted post-industrial communities. Richard Sackler, the dynasty’s latter-day patriarch, promoted a defense that blamed addicts for their own predicament. Only bad people, criminals, get addicted to Oxy. In the world of the novel, the killer’s depraved acts refute this argument by performing it. By killing junkies, Goebel’s murderer firmly locates responsibility outside, in the world, rather than within victims themselves. In Goebel’s novel, Dick Sickler (Richard Sackler’s fictional correlate), pushes Sackler’s position even further: “ours is the last generation that’ll know the planet before it grows inhospitable,” Sickler jibes at a party. “The riff raff’ll die off. That’s not on me.”
For the most part, though, we spend our time in LA, not with the billionaire class, but with Susie Vogelman and Phil Krolik, an NYU dropout and her former “professor.” Goebel is on record explaining that these characters emerge from his own biography and inner life, which, tragically, includes losing a sibling to opioids. Retired co-ed Susie is gorgeous, wealthy (her father is Sickler’s lawyer), and addicted to pills—imagine Sydney Sweeney reading Nietzsche by the pool in White Lotus, except she’s strung out. Phil is a repentant woke academic, a trust-fund kid gone to seed, exhausted by failed left activism and prestige teaching alike. He moves to LA in hopes of finding both Peter, his addict twin brother, and a renewed sense of purpose. Susie, at nineteen, plays the ingenue, bold and naïve at the same time, but she’s also wise beyond her years, an artist searching for her medium across a hopelessly impure media-scape, irreverent and unscrupulous in the ways Millennials believe Gen Z to be. Phil shares with Susie some of the academy’s greatest hits (Marx, Butler, Said) before he flies into LAX, connects with Susie’s illuminati-esque parents, and opens a rehab cum drug palace to lure Peter in. The novel plays Susie and Phil’s positions against each other throughout, delivering the artist and the academic over to their distinct fates in the dark future the Orange Candidate augurs.
For Goebel, then, Kill Dick is also, in part, a drag performance. This impetus he shares with other male writers of his generation; there’s been a vogue for women protagonists since mid-century giants like Saul Bellow and John Updike got cancelled for too much dick. (Even Gen X progenitor Jonathan Franzen has confessed that he gets distance on material he incorporates from his experience by ascribing a fictionalized version of it to a woman). Thirty years ago, Susie might have come to life as a man, as the novel, ever metafictional, admits. Susie “wasn’t her father’s subject anymore,” she reflects. “She was the main character, and he couldn’t stand it.”
Killing the dick inside himself, Goebel no doubt has ambitions to join the crew of hot young mean girls (Madeleine Cash, Honor Levy) at whom critics keep finger-wagging for not being left enough, his wife, Ottessa Moshfegh, a sort of honorary OG among them. Moshfegh endorses the novel on its cover and indulges in a bit of gender-play herself—“If this book were any better, I’d cut my own head off,” she quips. The blurb is also a spoiler: Moshfegh inserts herself where the novel wants Dick to go. It’s true that the book hopes to urge us past stale binaries as we witness the death of our two-party system, and perhaps, of electoral politics writ large. “Don’t be a liberal idiot,” Susie warns us. “Or a conservative fascist.” Neither position is tenable anymore. But can a middle-aged man write a believable teenage girl? Yes and no. Yes to Susie’s flights of philosophic fancy, to her hedonism, her amoral moralism, her stroke of creative genius (like a latter-day Duchamp, Susie fulfills herself as an artist when she is moved to sign a corpse as an artwork). No to all the mid-century Oedipal stuff—has a demoiselle in a bikini, however stoned, ever wondered if her father can smell her pussy?
In a way, though, it doesn’t matter. Identity in this book is up for grabs. Royal-Lee, a queer character too pure and innocent for this world, moves often between pronouns; Phil and his twin swap identities more than once; Susie, unable to settle on a point of view, shifts back and forth between third- and first-person narration. That identity is constructed is a given—what is under discussion is precisely who does the constructing, how, and to what end. “We aren’t in control of everything,” Phil tells Susie. “Or are we? I was taught I was not meant to be responsible for my life…now they say my thoughts equal my words equal my actions equal my destiny.” In LA, we’re manifesting smoothies, cigarettes, sex parties, Oxy. The rich, on the other hand, have no such qualms. They know they make reality, and not only in that attenuated individual sense. The Sicklers and their crowd of mask-wearing Epstein-ites use philanthropy to “get on the board, influence what enters museums.” They indulge in “surveillance capitalism—making money off seeing the most from the highest point.” Under these conditions, caught between an overdetermined cultural apparatus and a panoptic economy, it’s no wonder everyone’s getting high. Of addiction under our mode of capitalism, one character opines, “this is the best alternative, until there’s a better world. At least drugs work.”
Ultimately, the book is a study of how the problems of postmodernism are still with us, even though nobody wants to talk about them that way anymore. How do we make meaning in a world in which truth and value are relative, in the absence of the old tenets, faith, beauty, America? Are we constructed by systems outside of our control, or do we construct those selves and systems? If both, how should we understand our power, our limitations? What is reality? Will we recognize it when we see it? Is it something worth fighting over? Can we take it back?
These questions plague us still, and yet, we often treat them as a passe French fad from the 1900s. The contradictions persist; we merely live in the wash of them, all screen and glimmer, shifting surfaces, wane of democracy, emptied subjects. Goebel recognizes this, a kind of Derridean hauntology turning the world spectral (“Everyone is a ghost now,” Susie says), and at the same time, he warns we can’t go back. A one-time member of the woke professoriate, Phil’s erudition can’t save him, so higher education and its special discourses aren’t going to save us, either. Phil might be able to quote from Thus Spake Zarathustra, might go on to “discuss Luddites and technocracy…and Das Kapital, Mein Kampf, and 4Chan” all night, but on his own, he can’t find his way to a better future.
That’s up to Susie, whose vocation as an artist allows her to forge a path forward into a world Phil cannot access. Even still, Phil’s teachings are not completely worthless. In the end, Susie draws inspiration from Phil’s commitment to the world, to people, to the materiality of the body, and she channels that into the new forms she invents, a project that will eventually help her get clean, will presumably, off the page, help her push on past the first Trump presidency, which is about to break over her head, over all of us. Perhaps that’s the book’s most postmodern gambit. In anarchic, experimental new forms, rather than in revolution, Goebel sees the way out for Susie, and perhaps, for the rest of us. At least in our works of imagination, it’s never too late to kill dick.
