Luke Goebel
Kill Dick
Red Hen Press, 2026

The word-of-mouth and press campaign for Luke Goebel’s Kill Dick has been impossible to ignore. Flashy pink- and yellow-hued social videos. Stenciled sidewalk graffiti. Street teams. Goebel took a page from the promotional lessons he learned in his film career—he co-wrote and produced Eileen and Causeway—to ensure the news of his first novel in a decade reached potential readers. His swagger, passion, and relentless energy spill out onto the page, as well.

Kill Dick follows an NYU student from Brentwood as she returns home to city on fire and a serial killer targeting addicts. Kill Dick is an indictment of the systems and fraying social contract that created the opioid crisis and a feverish, vociferous addition to the vaulted canon of LA noir.

I met Goebel at his AWP off-site party for Kill Dick, shortly after he purchased a stake in iconic independent publisher New York Tyrant. This interview was conducted over email.

Jackie Corley (Rail): The protagonist in Kill Dick is Susie, a privileged nineteen-year-old who is addicted to opiates and returns to her parents’ Brentwood home after being kicked out of NYU. You’ve spoken about your addiction to opiates and losing your brother to the disease. Did seeing addiction through her eyes change your understanding of your own experience?

Luke Goebel: I’ve been a drug addict since before I hit puberty. I guess this is what Susie Vogelman taught me about my addiction and my brother’s addiction. Just how simple the need is for a little peace and quiet. She lies every moment on the knife’s edge and feels all this pressure to matter—and this is something the rich really do experience, the privileged, although I hate that term—who bestows the privileges? I really feel Susie exists and has a soul. Maybe it’s transmogrified from my soul and other addicts’ souls I’ve known and engaged with, but I feel she’s real, and she needs some comfort. The equation was laid bare by Susie Vogelman’s expository set up: you get abused, your father abuses you, society pressures you with this insanely painful negation of self unless you’re powerful and rich and talented and charming and good looking, and when you come from privilege, it’s amplified, and when you find the drugs your dad makes all his money serving as primary attorney for the manufacturer, an oligarch who owns the company and has pocketed billions, Dick Sickler, and you say, “Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.” Then it tries to kill you! Unless you kill it first.

Rail: In her blurb, Harriet Armstrong called it a “fever dream,” which was how I experienced it as a reader. What were some of those scenes or visuals that arrived first and haunted you?

Goebel: The first scene is the hospital. The morphine. The bone. The moment everything changes. I became a vampire of the poppy when a male nanny snapped my femur in half when I was twelve. When the morphine hit me after an hour without medical attention and with my femur in half and my bone jangling near the femoral artery, which, if nicked, you’ll die in minutes, I just knew everything.

Another scene is Susie by the pool in Brentwood—stoned on a chaise longue, wiggling her toes in the hot wind, plastered to the chair in her mother’s bathrobe, feeling nothing, high, while the killings begin to circle her life. Another is New York. The dorm room. The body. The pills gone. The carpet. The questions. Finding her NYU roommate dead on their dorm room blue-gray carpet hadn’t helped her state of mind, with campus police swarming, a body bag, all the questions. Another is the hotel.