Book Review

“I can lie to you, but it would break the sacred bond of storytelling,” says Susie Vogelman, the unreliable nineteen-year-old NYU dropout and struggling artist at both the center and periphery of Kill Dick, Luke Goebel’s second novel. At times Susie tells her story directly, in first person, then breaks the fourth wall, letting the reader know she’s going to slide back into third person. She tells the reader, “In order to craft this, I need to include multiple points of view, inviting the characters into the story, wrestling with their metaphysics as best I can. I’ll slip back into my role of third person narrator, where I’m more comfortable, rejoining those terrible winds.” From the third person, she recounts a series of murders dubbed “the killings” in her hometown of Los Angeles where she’s returned to after leaving New York City. “The killings” take place ahead of the 2016 election, described in the context of the Orange Candidate along with the ongoing and increasing opioid crisis. Victims of “the killings” have one thing in common: an addiction to opioids.

At times it’s easy to forget that Susie is leading the narrative, as her third person point of view turns omniscient and zooms in on other characters vital to the story behind “the killings.” Phil Krolick, a lecturer at NYU who titles himself a “professor” and who Susie rendezvoused with before he lost his job at the university, is one of them. Like Susie, Phil comes from wealth and once he is let go from his job, cashes in on his trust fund to open up a faux rehabilitation center, “the Villa,” in LA, a place Susie describes to him as “a whole world of people . . . dreaming up whatever world they think they’re living in.” Phil is in pursuit of his twin brother, Peter, who he’s lost contact with as a result of Peter’s addiction to OxyContin.

Kill Dick is a book of dichotomies. Everyone is trying to be or become someone else. No one knows who they are. After moving to LA, Phil steals his brother’s first name and rebrands as Peter Holiday, “[l]ike something momentous that deserved to be celebrated.” He changes the way he dresses, wears a wig and fake beard, and feeds his patients—and himself—prescription pills. Susie is self-aware in her self-dichotomies. She is vegan, something she reminds us throughout the novel, yet discloses how her mouth waters over “animal flesh” and how, when she eats beef jerky, she’s aware someone might smell it on her breath. Perhaps these dichotomies stem from the world in which the characters live—one that wrestles between reality and dreams. It considers a world working both within and against systems and institutions. Back in first person, Susie tells the reader, “Anyhow . . . it’s pretty obvious that the system controls everything. You can only rise if you work yourself to the top by working the market’s rules [. . .]” It’s unclear who has power. Phil-turned-Peter finds himself in positions of power, both as lecturer and head of “the Villa,” but even he is railing against a system enabling the opioid crisis. The system is larger than him and he finds himself invited into the Church of White Institutions, an organization with Dick Sickler at its center, a character undoubtedly inspired by Richard Sackler, whose family controlled, developed, and marketed OxyContin. Whatever power Susie has in controlling this narrative is also intertwined within this larger system. Who is Susie but a struggling artist whose struggles are self-serving, the kind in which her life allows her to fail because she can rely on the wealth of her father who works for Sickler?

Maybe Susie’s only way out is to lean into the protections of generational wealth and craft the kind of story, and therefore life, that becomes art.

To be a ‘killer,’ to be an artist, to be the Orange President, to be an influencer, that’s all the same game. To take by force that which should be the gift of transformation from the one-sidedness of wonder into the glory of representing it in a new light, to all. To gain freedom, by any means necessary. That is it: art. But to be an artist carries a hefty responsibility. The artist must play the art world, its bizarre ultra-wealthy collections, and still manage to liberate herself through a devout practice of exploration of both the self and the divine. Or else she’s just irrelevant bullshit.

Kill Dick opens with three epigraphs from the Wizard of Oz. The third reads, “[. . .] and here they laid her gently on the soft grass and waited for the fresh breeze to waken her up.” Sure, the Wizard of Oz is behind the curtain, but it’s Dorothy’s dream and reality; it’s her story. The convergence of the two shows up in similar ways in both texts: the wind keeps blowing; both girls are drawn to the blooming of flowers; they’re living in a dream state. But in Kill Dick, reality keeps reemerging: people are dying. This here feels more like fact than the kind of plot intended to make readers feel something. “The killings” are performance—chopped off fingers, decapitations, nipples cut off, and sewn on eyelids. It is art in the making and Susie, a failed, or perhaps burgeoning, artist is telling this tale. No wonder Goebel’s estranged partner, writer Ottessa Moshfegh, blurbs, “If this book were any better, I’d cut my own head off.”

Like the tornado in the Wizard of Oz, Kill Dick can be read cyclically from beginning to end, back to beginning to end, and so on. The novel opens two weeks after it ends, with an intentional third person distance describing the ways in which the wind blows through different parts of LA. Once that distance is established and Susie has the reader where she wants them, the novel shifts to first person, formally introducing herself in relation to the story, “I didn’t know it then, bombed on Oxy, the drug that was killing the world, but my young life was about to come rushing at me like a murderer. Everything was fate, like the wind, and blew past me unnoticed.” Susie is telling this story. She’s behind the curtain; she has control. She’s going to be fine.