Ten years and four drafts ago, Luke Goebel sat down to channel all the sorrow and anger he felt about the state of the nation, the corruption he believed seeped from every corner of society, and the death of his brother into the novel that became “Kill Dick.”
“What you see at the end, this sunshine noir, this L.A. thriller, dark, luminous and humorous social satire was the very last iteration,” Goebel says on a recent video call. “And really came even after the book had been sold.
“The book was really a way to work through the loss of my brother, who died of an Oxy overdose in 2011, and the grief and rage that I felt,” he says.
“It was also a way of trying to come to terms with the splintering of our society and the degradation of the moral character of the nation that I saw in 2015, 2016,” Goebel continues. “I felt the nation needed a moral correction, and it wasn’t happening.”
“Kill Dick” tackles serious topics – the OxyContin-fueled opioid epidemic, a secret society of wealthy powerbrokers, the wild west of sketchy rehab centers, among them – and wraps them inside a murder mystery.
Set in 2016, 19-year-old Susie drops out of NYU to come home to Brentwood and pop pills by the pool. When the drug haze occasionally lifts, Susie follows the bizarre serial killings of homeless opioid addicts in Los Angeles and fights with her father, attorney for Dick Sickler, whose pharmaceutical firm is largely responsible for the nation’s drug epidemic.
In South Los Angeles, Susie’s former NYU professor has reinvented himself as a drug rehab operator. He’s changed his first name to Peter in tribute to his addict brother, who’s gone missing in the city, and adopted the last name of Holiday as a joke about his new life in the Southern California sun: Peter Holiday.
As the murders continue, Susie and Peter and his assistant Royal Lee orbit each other until the slow-burning fuse of the mystery erupts in the final pages.
“I wanted to find a story that would help me do a serious book, not just a dark satire, but also makes you think about these systems,” Goebel says of the ways in which the opioid epidemic was able to claim tens of thousands of lives in the United States every year.
“A story that makes people feel less alone, less confused, more able to say, OK, here’s an example,” he says. “It’s like here’s a clear example of some misdoings, some questionable ethics, that led to a lot of dead people.
“In some ways, it’s a Sophoclean dilemma. Like, ‘You know what happened to your loved one; what are you going to do about it?’”
Goebel and novelist Ottessa Moshfegh married in 2018, and the pair have collaborated on film projects. Several weeks after this interview, Moshfegh announced on social media that they are currently separated.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: How much did the book change over four drafts?
A: It’s vastly different. The first draft was incredibly experimental in terms of the prose style. I don’t think I’ve ever read a novel that goes from first person into third, back into first. [The technique, used for Susie’s part of the novel, remains in the final version.] That was a discovery that happened at the end.
But the first version of this book was just a mess that I wrote on typewriters and was the worst type of fragile male prose writing of just all these complaints. [He laughs} It was this jeremiad of, like, “I know things!” And all of that had to go aside from the impetus and a few choice lines.
I wrote the book four times, and it wasn’t until the last one that I really got to the humor. There was already this sort of more classical literary style and these more ornate sentences that are doing three different things at once, and some of the playfulness and the provocative and the prurient and the spiritual kind of call to care for the least of the people.
But it wasn’t until the last one that surprises happened. Like I wrote Sickler into scenes and he was funny. I was like, “Oh man, I’ve betrayed myself!” Like I was supposed to get vengeance, and I actually can’t stop laughing at this guy, even though it’s so awful that he is so disturbed he will cut his own family out of his will forever because of a drawing that a child has done.
Q: What’s the drawing?
A: He sees a swirl that his granddaughter drew, and he thinks that it’s about him being a minotaur or [part of] some kind of evil society of child eaters. Which is tongue in cheek to the whole blood libel of the 2016 election that I was talking about, and the secret society preoccupation the book has. [Ed. note: In 2016, a conspiracy theory known as “Pizzagate” falsely claimed that children were being exploited by Democratic politicians in the basement of a Washington D.C. pizza parlor.]
But I found him funny, and I found a lot of things in the book funny. And I have to remind myself that, “Oh, right, this is a really serious book that has elements of wanting to expose the unethical and disastrous greed that a family and their company enacted on the world.
When you start to write something that takes this many people’s experiences into account, I ended up inadvertently having more empathy for everyone. It’s just like, “God, you know, not that I forgive them, but everybody’s just a little bit crazy from a world that’s really crazy.
Q: Let’s talk about Los Angeles as the setting for the story. When and how did you move here?
A: I grew up in a small town in Ohio. I moved to Portland, Oregon, when I was 11. I broke my femur. I got addicted to morphine. I ended up addicted to pills and alcohol. I became an addict at a very young age. I’m sober now.
My brother and I were both addicts. He died, I lived. I came to Southern California for the first time to rehab in Palm Springs. It was right next to Melvyn’s at the Ingleside Estate. We stayed there, Ottessa and I, when our house almost burned down in the desert.
Q: Where in the desert?
A: After my brother died, he left me about $75,000 from his work insurance policy. I figured he’d want me to share that with our only other sibling, our sister. We were both broke, and we looked at Joshua Tree and ended up in Landers in the last house before the Twentynine Palms Marine bombing range.
Then she took over with a cat and a boyfriend, and I had to move. I ended up buying a place in this neighborhood called Snow Creek, where Timothy Leary lived. Eric Burdon and the Animals lived there. Leonard Cohen had a house there, one of 100 in the world that revolved on a motor. It’s just a weird little neighborhood of artists. At least it was.
I was teaching at UC Riverside. Ottessa’s book “Homesick for Another World” was coming out. The LA Review of Books asked if I wanted to interview her. I started ham-fistedly emailing her bad emails like, “You think maybe we could get together in person? I’m just out here in the desert.”
So I interviewed her. It was our first conversation ever, and I never left the interview. We stayed together after like a week. I was like, “Maybe I should go home.” She’s like, “I don’t want you to.” Then we were engaged within like four or five weeks, and that began my life, really, in L.A.
Q: How have you come to know it – as a place to live, a place to write about?
A: My feelings about L.A. are that it’s such an interesting place to set a novel because it’s in direct communication with the whole world. You look at a San Francisco noir or a San Francisco novel. Its tendrils are usually pretty short reaching. It’s a small network of people that affect one another. You look at L.A., and you get the octopus.
Just the power of this town is incredibly immense, and the ability to tell a story that reaches so far into the psyche and hearts of America.
But I also think it’s a very difficult town to talk about because it’s so stratified. I mean, how do you talk about L.A. without talking about the L.A. that is [entertainment] industry, the L.A. that is non-industry, the L.A. that’s West Side, the L.A. that’s East Side. They’re so incredibly different. Downtown and Skid Row, Compton and Pasadena.
Q: We’ve talked about how it changed, and the book does have a lot of different pieces: a bit of noir, philosophy, art and literature criticism, humor and outrage. How’d you find the balance point for all that?
A: It was hard work for me, which maybe is a strike against me or something, that it takes so long and so much work. Because, you know, Ottessa, she writes a book in a couple of years, and I think Bret [Easton Ellis] serialized “The Shards,” which was an influence on this. I told him that.
It is for me like self-doubt and fear and surety that it’s all going to be a failure and I’m going to walk away with nothing. It’s just a gambler’s dilemma that I just keep going and going.
But this really was a book that had no road map. I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know where I was going. I can’t believe it came together. All I can see is that I learned a lot from living with Ottessa. I learned a lot from writing films together. [Goebel and Moshfegh cowrote the screenplays for “Causeway” and for the adaptation of her novel “Eileen.”]
But I think part of it is just a reflection of the life that I’ve lived, that I have all these elements inside of myself. They are all characters from my psyche, and it’s like a Shakespearean drama made up of different versions of myself.
Q: When you finished the book, having climbed this mountain for the last 10 years, where did you feel you were in terms of the hard things you’d gone through in life that inspired this?
A: I mean, as somebody who’s been in two mental institutions and four rehabs and five jail cells – and gone off a cliff at 65 and had guns drawn on me – my nervous system isn’t just like, “Oh good. Now I feel relief.” I’m still doing this book in a very non-traditional manner.
I’m managing a team of like six people, so it’s just madness. Every moment I’m getting a text, every moment there’s a crisis, every moment somebody wants to know about this item of merch or this item of swag or this bookstore. That’s just on the smallest level.
Then there’s the PR teams and the marketing teams and this woman who’s doing these videos that I’m making, my own kind of madcap “Luke Likes Glue” stories on social media. The stuff I’m doing on social media is insane. And now the book is in production, early development, to be a series.
So I don’t even think like I’ve gotten a chance [to reflect on it]. I think it’ll be different when I see the book on shelves. That’s the real moment.
Q: I’m sure that’ll feel great.
A: But to answer the question from an emotional place, for the first three-and-a-half drafts of the book, the real Peter Krolik, who is [inspired by] my brother in the book, he’s only the body in the freezer. He was never alive on the pages. So that was a surprise to get to go into his consciousness [when Goebel decided to make him a living character].
That’s one of my favorite chapters in the book. So getting to have him back and having that catharsis of being with my brother while I was writing that chapter, you know, I was crying. I was like, “Man, I get to be with him again. That’s cool.”
Luke Goebel book events
Saturday, April 25: Goebel will be in conversation with novelist Caroline Kepnes, whose “You” book series was adapted into the Netflix series of the same name. Event begins at 3 p.m. at Vroman’s Bookstore, 695 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena.
Thursday, June 4: Goebel will talk and sign books at 6 p.m. at Zibby’s Bookshop, 1113 Montana Ave., Santa Monica.