“The LA novel is so exciting because it’s so technicolor,” says novelist and screenwriter Luke Goebel. “There’s so much to Los Angeles. It’s such an unattainable dream. You go to San Francisco, and the dream is money. You go to New York, and the dream is power. You go to LA, and the dream is to be relevant and to be able to make things creatively. That’s something that always extends the reach of everyone. It’s a dream that has real consequences, especially for the people who don’t get to achieve that dream.”

Goebel’s forthcoming novel, Kill Dick, releases via Red Hen Press this April. It’s his second publication since his debut, Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours, which won the Ronald Sukenick Prize for Innovative Fiction. In the time since then, he’s co-founded Omniscient Productions with his wife, Ottessa Moshfegh, with whom he also wrote screenplays such as the Academy Award contender Causeway (2022), featuring Jennifer Lawrence and Brian Tyree Henry, and Eileen (2023), with Thomasin McKenzie and Anne Hathaway. “I was so lucky to have met my wife and been able to be a part of the world of visual artists and actors and producers and screenwriters, and to make films and to get to be in certain realms of the city that are very profound and brilliant,” he reflects. “People sometimes brush LA off because it’s a bit ironic...There is a tendency to forget that you’re alive and that you’re going to die and that there’s any consequence, and that time doesn’t go on forever. It’s a dream that just kind of floats, and it’s easy to float with it. But there’s also some of the most interesting, intelligent, and creative people I’ve ever met in the world in LA, and I think that people don’t always acknowledge that.”

Kill Dick takes place in the fraying seams of a disenfranchised society: Los Angeles in the mid-2010s, an election year. Susie, Kill Dick’s protagonist, is a beautiful, rich, opioid addict. An NYU dropout and aspiring artist, she’s a child of Brentwood wealth, her father the lawyer to OxyContin mogul Richard Sickler. While Susie wastes away poolside, a series of vicious murders unfold in her city; specifically, dismembered and deformed dead bodies of unfortunate addicts keep turning up in hotel rooms. In tandem with “the killings,” Goebel’s plot envelopes a fraudulent rehabilitation facility with links to a cultish secret society, dangerous stunts at high-profile Hollywood events, suffering, conspiracy, and reality loss. Unlike the predecessors of her beautifully tortured archetype, Goebel does not romanticize Susie’s pain but instead employs it to capture the reality of a contemporary moment—one of a collective anger with power imbalances, the failed accountability of a ruling class, and a society’s perceived helplessness against corruption, all framed through a Baudrillardian lens of the opioid epidemic.

Goebel began writing this book 10 years ago—in that decade, the country and its accepted norms have radically shifted, a change that, instead of dating Kill Dick, solidifies it in the now. “In some ways it feels kind of like a gift, a prescient thing…Especially after Luigi Mangione. [Susie] is very much a female version of Luigi Mangione. She’s wealthy. She’s extremely good-looking. She comes from a family of influence, and she takes action against the head of a pharmaceutical empire,” he says of the book’s relevance. “I started [Kill Dick] in 2015, but by the time we were in full swing, I was paying a lot of attention to QAnon and what was happening in the 2016 election…I watched the nation, as we all have, change under new rules, to a place where these kind of acts of terror become—what Luigi Mangione [did] if you want to call that an act of terror—those kind of actions that are violent by nature become the sort of outcry, or the release of pressure in a system that doesn’t allow for an exchange, or for people to feel like they have agency. My brother died of an Oxy overdose 14 years ago, and I sort of felt like it was a Sophoclean Greek tragedy situation. What do you do to mourn your dead when you know that these people were part of killing him? How do you get revenge?”

Almost everyone in his story wants revenge, but all Goebel wants is for people to care—for themselves, for each other, for a cause. In Minster, Ohio he was raised to age 11 in a 2,500-person town of German Catholics, born to parents who met in a Christian cult and in so doing raised him on Christian values. “If I’m going to take anything from that,” he thinks, “it’s like, radical care and love for other people.” He is also on the Board of Directors, along with notable authors Melissa Febos and Kaveh Akbar, of Portland’s Alano Club, a non-profit and the oldest non-clinical recovery center in the United States that deals with addiction. “I’m doing street advocacy and outreach and trying to get Narcan in people’s hands and get people into treatment, and get the money from the settlement with the Sacklers and the opioid epidemic—the billions that are available—and direct it towards the Alano Club and other nonprofits and rehab and treatment instead of policing,” he says. “I like to be in contact with people so that I can see their humanity...the real thing that they want to know is that you want to know what their name is.”

In a novel of betrayal, deceit, sacrifice, and also love, I wonder what Goebel believes we all might owe to each other in a time where so little seems within our control. His answer is justifiably long-winded, but all in all, it’s “to remember humanity and to actually connect,” he pauses. “But, I mean, I don’t know, do we owe that? I like that, but I don’t know if anybody owes anything. That’s kind of the harshness of the time we’re in. Hence, Baby, It’s Cold Inside. The whole idea that anybody owes anybody anything seems to have gone out the window. You go out on a date, and people are like, ‘Do you have private jet money?’”

Photographed by Exavier Castro

Styled by Michy Foster

Written by Franchesca Baratta

Grooming: Jessie Yarborough at Celestine Agency

Photo Assistant: Gilberto Ortiz

Gaffer: Marcelo Mercado

Production Assistant: Ke’von Terry