KILL DICK

In 2016 Los Angeles, a wealthy college dropout and her former professor trade academia for opiates.

When New York University art student Susie Vogelman finds her roommate dead of an OxyContin overdose, she palms the remaining pills and checks into the Carlyle Hotel. There, she orders room service and gets high with her favorite teacher, Phil Krolik, until the school finally contacts her parents. Susie then moves back home to her family’s Brentwood mansion, where she passes time by the pool in a stoned daze, only exiting the community’s gates for meetups with her dealer, Royal-Lee. Phil, newly fired, cashes in his trust fund and goes in search of his twin brother, Peter, an unhoused addict last seen in LA. Hoping to attract and eventually help Peter, Phil buys the Villa—a turnkey, fully subsidized rehab center run out of an apartment building in West Adams. The work is harder and less profitable than Phil anticipated, so he joins the Church of White Illumination, a secret society of rich and powerful men. With the connections he makes, and with Royal-Lee’s assistance, Phil begins providing drugs to his residents so they’ll participate in the facility’s programming. As Susie’s and Phil’s paths inexorably reconverge, the mutilated corpses of junkies start turning up in seedy motels all over Hollywood. Goebel’s novel takes the guise of a roman à clef written by Susie after the fact, the introduction teasing Phil’s, Royal-Lee’s, and Susie’s own entanglement with these killings. Shot through with the sort of pseudo-profundity endemic to youthful privilege, Susie’s rambling, terminally jaundiced narrative paints a darkly surreal Lynch- and Kubrick-inspired portrait of LA. Regrettably, while Goebel’s sentence-level writing is undeniably artful, his plot lacks coherence, sapping the tale of impact and drive.

Oozing with style but wanting for substance.