Luke Goebel’s KILL DICK is available from Red Hen Press on April 14th, 2026.
Los Angeles is not a city that produces novels. It produces pressure. It produces atmosphere. At face value, its promise is that it will always go on to produce pleasure, leisure, and entertainment forever. Which seems to be less true, all the time, as entertainment gives way to critique.
I don’t hold with those who fret we are losing the film industry, although it will continue to transmogrify itself to NYC and elsewhere. The monster shoving fistfuls of popcorn wants to gaze at itself reflected on screen, trying to get a clear view of its own monstrousness as it digests, burps, farts, and gasps—falls in love, etc.
L.A. always produces conditions under which narrative becomes destabilized and meaning becomes suspect—this is its magic trick, lifting the curtain and seeing how pliable meaning has always been. It’s a hall of mirrors set against hills periodically on fire. For decades, the rest of the country treated Los Angeles as some kind of immense aberration—a moral experiment gone wrong. A too flexible world of smart people messing with reality.
As if the city holding up a mirror to the thing being reflected could be to blame—rather than the subject exercising its own vanity before the looking glass. “Mirror, mirror on the wall,” but in reverse. Instead of a “fair’ reflection, it calls for more of a “horsemaning” style of portraiture, such that was popular in the 1920s, when L.A. was first really getting invented.
“Horsemaning” is a style of portraiture where someone lays on a table with their head dropped off the back of the plane and therefore leaving their head rendered invisible in the background, while someone else (a child maybe) stands behind the far plane of table with just their head appearing over the tabletop. Thus, the effect appears to be a body with its head removed. The head is resting smiling on the tabletop far enough away from the rest of the headless remains to become what Freud called the “uncanny.” This won’t go away, this desire to see things newly and to play with reflection. It’s just less charming, less entertaining, less inspiring as the veil is pulled back and we see ourselves as the monster, not as the gentry. There’s no going back to getting our heads on straight at this point in the game.
Too much sunlight. Too much money. Too little consequence. That is of what L.A. stands accused. Historically, L.A. was seen as a place where narrative was malleable because people had stopped believing in meaning. We were the bad people who made movies—and if there was anything to be gleaned from watching it was that the good people were back in the Midwest or back East and the monsters belonged in Hollywood. But that reading now feels not only wrong, but backwards. Or headless. And L.A. literature has always operated in the same register. We have a darker truth to tell, dripping in sunshine, and it’s truer than novels set anywhere else in America. Our implications are further reaching.
Los Angeles was never the exception, not as location or as mirror. It was the early draft of America. It was the truth, told with a wink, before people perhaps wanted to see their reality more accurately reflected. What appeared as distortion or deception was actually clarity. What appeared as moral absence was actually exposure. L.A. did not imagine excess, corruption, spectacle, or disconnection out of the void. It simply revealed these landmarks of our society sooner, more vividly, and without total apology.
And L.A. literature works in a similar vein. The earliest Los Angeles novel people point to is usually The Day of the Locust, published in 1934. Nathaniel West conjures an America set in L.A. that is already broken and freakish, and West knows he’s pointing at the entire nation; his people are drifters, weirdos, and West was one of them, although coming to L.A. doesn’t mean they aren’t like the rest of the Americans. West came from a middle-class Jewish family in New York City, and early on had a questionable academic path at Brown and Tufts before moving to L.A. to work as a screenwriter, while creating what is still one of my absolute favorite novels, The Day of the Locust, which largely was the inspiration when I sat down a decade ago to write what has now become my L.A. novel, KILL DICK.
In The Day of the Locust what matters most is not plot but inevitability, which is a telltale feature of L.A. novels and a perfect reflective surface to contemporary life. The corruption and the forces of society are already going to rise against us. The crowd gathers because something must happen. America is completely predictable in its insanity. A riot in L.A. is not surprising, it’s structural. Hollywood is going to burst before the story begins. America cannot hold the center. As spectacle precedes narrative, so American greed and billionaire-lead-socio- political-economic kakistocracy proceed my narrator and main character, Susie Vogelman before she fully gets involved in the events which will lead the beheading of DICK.
Violence is simply the surface cracking under pressure, both for West and for the foreseeable future in L.A. It’s all inevitable. Which is how a good narrative must always function, as surprising inevitability.
Some readers are in love with KILL DICK and some critics are a bit appalled because the novel doesn’t wait for permission—it jumps right into the heartbreak of L.A., which is what the L.A. novel must do. Susie is a character forced to shroud herself with Oxy, irony, and wall herself off in a private garden of anxiety before taking direct action against the system she was born too closely inside of to ignore. Even her final action is inevitable, a circumstance thrust upon her, a fate and karma, as the wheel of L.A. spins and the final shots ring out. When we meet her, she is barely embodied, forced to be there before she has any chance to be cared for, a victim of her father’s greed and her best friend’s family of Oxy manufacturing billionaire psychos.
Raymond Chandler refines L.A. instability into tone. In The Big Sleep, the case dissolves into atmosphere. The crime is secondary. The psychopathic daughters of the mogul seem charming and attractive. All that matters is the feeling that something is wrong everywhere, all the time, and corruption is not an act, it’s the climate here in Los Angeles.
Although, it’s not just L.A. One family with money not wanting to talk about what happened in their home is enough to destroy many lives, both in Kill Dick and in The Big Sleep and every day in America at the top. The lives of the wealthy effect all in an L.A. book. This is painfully true all over.
It is more and more true of the powerful in America every day. Hollywood is not inventing monsters, it’s revealing them, predicting them, and the L.A. novel exists in this same state. Private Investigator Phillip Marlowe does not uncover truth to attempt to change his world—he moves through a system where reality has already been compromised, deception baked into the landscape, and all he does is to understand his world and his self, more out of existential understanding than righteousness. He’s an existential detective long before this term was coined in I Heart Huckabee’s.
In the forties, the L.A. novel continued to look at the pressure cooker of politics, rage, paranoia, and violence. If He Hollers Let Him Go, brilliantly titled, precedes Chandler and looks at wartime L.A. and race lines which are always ready to split L.A. as they are America. This is just so in Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress by its arrival in the 1990s.
John Steinbeck complicates the image by introducing scale and expectation. California becomes promise. It becomes Eden. But Eden is mechanized. Access is denied as basis for a better profit model. The dream is still visible but structurally withheld. This tension between surface abundance and systemic exclusion becomes central not only to California, Los Angeles perhaps most of all, but to America itself.
By the time Joan Didion writes Play It As It Lays, the system has stopped pretending.
“Nothing applies.” Her sentence is not philosophical. It is diagnostic. The frameworks that once produced meaning—cause, effect, morality—no longer function. There’s no frame. It’s like what Lieutenant Kilgore says to Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, released when Didion was writing The White Album—both about systems collapsing into madness.
Kilgore enters the long awaited palace of rot set in a JUNGLE far from the “L.A. JUNGLE” Guns N Roses would sing about eight years later in their top 10 hit: “Welcome to the Jungle,” on my first ever cassette tape. I had to hide the cassette in my underwear drawer at age nine lest I be convicted by my midwestern parents who met in a Christian cult of succumbing to the Devil in Hollywood. Of course, when you look into the throughline from Stein’s Octopus to Reagan to Roger Stone and today’s Trump America 2.0, there’s something to these admonishments, although not in the now underlying antisemitic lens of QAnon’s movement which automatically is applied to the frame of L.A.—one of Trump’s most genius tricks.
Didion’s “Nothing applies” is ultra-relevant when examined in our current state of affairs. As is Martin Sheen’s response as Kilgore when queried if Colonel Kurt’s methods seem unsound. Of course, he responds with the militaristically honest quip, “I don’t see any method at all, sir.”
Martin Sheen delivered this line for Francis-Ford Coppola in Manila, while shooting the screenplay written for 15,000 dollars, for a film which would be Coppola’s magnum opus and win the Palme d’Or at Cannes. It received 8 Academy Award Nominations. The line is not just haunting because it pertained to the Vietnam War so much as to our entire nation—then and now. This has only grown truer. The current method-less presidency, as well as many seemingly devoid of method presidencies before, demonstrate the well-earned loss of faith in the whole project of America.
Kurtz responds back, “I expected someone like you. What did you expect?…”
What did you expect?
For Didion, the freeway becomes the expected dominant image: endless motion without resolution. What else is there? Movement and systems. Helena Maria Viramontes employs this freeway in a different but consistent fashion in Their Dogs Came with Them, exploring those who construct the freeways, those we are fragmented and haunted by them, and how the freeway looks different from purviews afforded by differences of privilege and access.
Eve Babitz answers the L.A. quandary not with despair, but with immersion. Her Los Angeles is seductive, excessive, alive. Pleasure exists. It matters. We come for a reason. But it is inseparable from corruption. Beauty is not the opposite of rot—it is its most pleasant disguise.
Bret Easton Ellis pushes us further into numbness. In Less Than Zero, everything happens and nothing registers. Violence is ambient. Emotion is absent. The problem is not that the world is cruel, but that it is experienced as background noise. For a long time, this was read as a some sort of “blame L.A.” regional pathology. Now it reads as national reality. The grotesquery in the mirror that once belonged to Hollywood now defines politics. Power performs itself and wealth is no longer subtle—it is flaunted, dramatized, mythologized, weaponized. Billionaires are not distant—they are on screen protagonists. Systems of extraction operate openly, wrapped in the language of patriotism and entertainment. The country has not become like Los Angeles. It has revealed that it always was the subject on screen and in the pages of the L.A. Canon. We were right, for good or ill. They demonized L.A. because they hated the power of the mirror.
There is a frequency to this realization that feels almost hallucinatory—a sense that the mask has slipped and no one is interested in putting it back on. Not chaos, but exposure, and not breakdown, but visibility.
Kill Dick emerges from this lineage not as reaction, but as culmination. At least that’s how I tried to write it. It opens in motion—wind, geography, drift—and settles on Susie Vogelman, already embedded in the system that will define her. There is no origin point. No clean beginning. The future is already present and the damage is already done. This is the structure of the Los Angeles novel. Not events, but conditions—and then the people take inevitable but shocking actions while feeling they’re not choosing at all.
Kill Dick tries to do something crucially new: I refused to leave those conditions abstract. The systems are no longer implied. They are named. Pharmaceuticals. Inherited wealth. The opioid economy. The family that makes Oxy and the billions they extract are laid bare. The body itself becomes evidence of structure, both for the dead and the still alive. Susie is not outside the system. She is produced by it. She understands it. She employs it to profound effect.
This is the evolution of the form as I undertook as challenge—from atmosphere to mechanism, from tone to architecture. How can the L.A. novel be made new and made useful. Because what truly defines the Los Angeles novel is not a lineage of writers, it is a set of conditions that must be present. A kind of environmental checklist. A grammar of place.
An L.A. novel must have inclement weather—Santa Ana winds, fires, and heat that distorts perception. Air that feels wrong. Weather that is psychological as much as physical. It must have riots—not necessarily literal, but always imminent. A sense that the crowd is waiting. That pressure is building. That something will break, and when it does, it will feel both shocking and inevitable. It should have secrets and secret societies—formal or informal. Networks of power that operate invisibly. Wealth that circulates behind closed doors. Systems that determine outcomes without revealing themselves.
It needs deep, tendered corruption—not crude, not loud, but embedded. Polished. Institutional. The kind of corruption that feels normal because it is everywhere. It must have heartless devastation—moments where the human cost becomes undeniable, yet remains unprocessed. Tragedy that does not resolve. Loss that does not produce meaning. Does this sound familiar, yet? I’m talking about America, and the entire world it has so largely helped fabricate. These are not elements added to a narrative. They are the narrative. Kill Dick contains all of them.
There is a moment in the novel that rejects interpretation entirely: look at the flower.
The instruction is simple. Almost naive. But hopefully, even early on as it comes, it carries force. There is no escape. The flower is the poison and is our life source. It’s all inextricably bound now. You’re in it, win, lose, or draw. You must find what it means to you. L.A. is this flower, too.
We are in the final moment of the Los Angeles novel as it reveals itself as reality’s cousin. The L.A. novel moves not toward resolution, but toward recognition. Los Angeles has always been a place where surface and depth collapse into each other. Where beauty and violence share the same frame. Where wealth and emptiness become indistinguishable. In Kill Dick, the air moves with intention. The environment feels unstable. The riot is always a scratch beneath the surface—as is the sense that something is coming, that the surface cannot hold. The secret systems operate quietly—wealth, pharmaceuticals, influence—structuring the world without announcing themselves. Corruption is not exposed because it is already known. The fires burn through the edges of the narrative, illuminating what cannot be controlled. And the devastation—emotional, physical, systemic—arrives without explanation, without closure.
The rest of the country is only now beginning to see it. Los Angeles was never the aberration.
It was the warning. And now the warning has become the condition itself. Wake up, Little Susie, there’s no way to go home. It’s the Wizard of Oz, and the guy behind the curtain has a knife and is going to kill you. The Los Angeles novel does not explain. It presents.
It does not argue. It reveals. In that revelation, something unsettling occurs: the reader recognizes the world not as fiction, but as structure. Not as exaggeration, but as mirror. The distance between narrative and reality collapses, and what remains is not clarity, but awareness. Sunshine noir is not darkness hidden in light. It is light exposing that there was never anything else.
