Kill Dick
Luke B. Goebel’s winking satirical novel Kill Dick parodies contemporary literary and cultural forms.
Set against sun-bleached Los Angeles—a place marked by wealth, addiction, and apathy—the book accumulates exaggerations of crime thrillers, moralizing social novels, and confessional autofiction. Its damaged young central character, Susie, is a caricatured vehicle for critiquing the decay of late capitalism.
The story sometimes speaks from inside Susie’s drugged, privileged adolescence as she studies in New York City or lounges around her family’s LA pool. At other times, the narrative follows Phil, Susie’s university professor, as he searches for his twin brother, and Royal-Lee, Susie’s trans friend.
On occasion, the narrator steps outside of the story to comment on the act of narration, on memory’s unreliability, and on the theatricality of Susie’s suffering. Self-awareness extends to the novel’s construction, with comments on section breaks and the shifting narrative perspective. In the process, the novel walks an unsteady tightrope between profound, absurd, and inconsequential.
Insights regarding complicity, privilege, and the aestheticization of violence sit beside trivial and grotesque observations, as of those of people experiencing homelessness and about the crippling nature of addiction. Irony often serves as a distraction that undercuts meaning, acting like a mirror to social instability. The prose reinforces these tensions, with short, punchy sentences that are sometimes sharp, sometimes disruptive, leaving some scenes feeling fragmented.
A piquing parody, the book reveals how easily critique becomes performance and how violence, addiction, and privilege transform into aesthetic currency. Its most vivid moments evince cutting wit.
Marked by deliberate instability, the ambitious satirical novel Kill Dick skewers contemporary literary seriousness even as it participates in it.
Reviewed by
pine breaks
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