Introduction

ACCLAIMED AUTHOR OF FOURTEEN STORIES, NONE OF THEM ARE YOURS, CO-WRITER of the films CAUSEWAY and EILEEN

RECIPIENT OF PRESTIGIOUS RONALD SUKENICK INNOVATIVE FICTION PRIZE AND JOAN SCOTT MEMORIAL FICTION AWARD

Most Anticipated Book of 2026 by LIT HUB and PLAYBOY, and featured in the NEW YORK POST'S “31 Page-Turning New Thrillers to Read.”

"Marked by deliberate instability, the ambitious satirical novel Kill Dick skewers contemporary literary seriousness even as it participates in it." —Foreword Reviews

A fever dream, Kill Dick is a literary thriller that plunges into the chaos of Los Angeles, where addiction, privilege, and corruption combust.

At nineteen, Susie Vogelman should be coasting: she’s an NYU dropout with no responsibilities, endless prescription pills, and a Brentwood estate to waste away in. But Los Angeles has other plans. A string of brutal murders targeting addicts spreads through the city, and Susie’s ivory tower begins to crumble. The headlines point too close to home: her father’s ties to an opioid empire, a sinister secret society, and her own complicity in the systems holding it all together.

Then there’s Peter Holiday, a disgraced professor running a rehab scam so audacious it’s almost admirable. When their lives collide, Susie and Peter are dragged into a web of privilege, corruption, and violence, where every escape leads deeper into the rot.

Dark, satirical, and razor-sharp, Kill Dick is a modern literary thriller that unflinchingly dissects wealth, exploitation, and the perilous line between survival and self-destruction.

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Excerpt

In Brentwood Circle, Los Angeles . . .

Here they came again, the winds, blowing through Hollywood, up and around the hills—dry and hot—roaming across Mulholland into Sherman Oaks and onto Burbank, or whooshing Laurel Canyon and down Beverly Glen, sifting buttermilk-pancake dust up through Beverly Hills and Bel Air—rustling clusters of pines and palms, sun-lashed sycamore and coastal redwood, rows of Italian Cypress, sun-hot oranges and lemons—before finally touching down in Brentwood, where Susie Vogelman lay stoned on a chaise longue by the swimming pool in her backyard, wiggling her toes indifferently in the rushing air.

She’d be sober in two weeks and a couple of boys would be dead at her hands, but she had no idea what to do now, plastered to the upholstered chair in her mother’s La Perla bathrobe. That fall was full of drama, but Susie wasn’t paying too much attention. Not to the coming election, or “the killings,” or the orange haze of doom that loomed on the horizon. Her mind was on the winds that carried the tawny dust from all over Los Angeles. She listened to the howling, slurped some drool. Her skin was burning through her tanning oil, but that was okay. Back in New York, she’d always stayed so pale. She’d been home since she’d dropped out of NYU about, what—a year, year and a half ago? Who could keep track of all that time? She’d spent most of it snoozing by the pool, feeling nothing, high. Dried cornflakes on her chin stuck like glue. She was safe. This was Brentwood. The barbarians at the gate didn’t know the guards in the entrance pavilion.

A neighbor’s yard wafted charred death into range, disturbingly seductive, warm animal flesh. Though she’d given up eating meat years ago, it was making her mouth water. The meal was likely being tended to by some interchangeable house staff, who from the smell of things was sneaking a cigarette. She knew cigarettes had been tested on lab beagles. Susie was pro-animal rights, anti-vivisection, anti-liberal, anti-conservative, anti-end-stage-capitalist—even as a child of fortune—but mostly she was anti-labels, anti-gravity, stoned as she had to stay upon the chaise by the water in order to tolerate her still life. The usual birds flitted and hummed in the pale air, fighting the autumnal gusts by the pool’s teal surface. They landed in her trees in the backyard—hiding out with Susie from the terrible fates that were coming that miserable fall.

? ? ?

This version of things begins with me windswept and stoned on the chaise, completely unaware of the changes that would drop me into the light of the platinum city and the world of “the killings” which would come to define this season in Los Angeles. 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. I barely caught mention of “the killings” on the news, which I avoided at least so much as I could help it. When I had, on rare occasions, seen news of the deaths on TV of a few fellow junkies hanging from hooks by their skulls or with zip ties slipped around their throats, dead in motels across Hollywood, they only registered as random bodies mutilated in bad hotels. There were other, more compelling horrors capturing the attention of the nation in those months during the fall of my nineteenth year. Early victims of “the killings” were simply addicts who had overdosed and had their hair cut off—hard to say in which order—and then it was parlor tricks of nipples severed and glued to eyelids, all that loud dross attention-getting by some Los Angeles sicko who wanted to be Charles Manson . . . or maybe they lived in Upland, or out in The Valley. No one I’d ever know.

I turned it into art—that’s what this novelization is about, this roman à clef: how protest was created, and how I, both an enfant terrible and an ingénue, was subjected to so much horror and engaged with it all. As a learning tool, or a study, a dead body is not new. I was the first to use the form as a medium for artistic protest. Or I became known as the first, which of course I wasn’t. It incurred plenty of hatred in the public sphere, but I stay out of the public sphere, like anyone with half a brain. I am a private person, but all I went through had a cinematic quality, an artistic sense of public drama appropriate for these commercial times.

I, of course, learned that the first “murder,” which had occurred a year before, was a young woman I knew. I later became convinced “the killer” was someone very, very close to me. As the writer of this piece, I don’t want to be in relationship to confession. I’m not carving a statue of myself. In court, where you first heard from me, I was left having to account for myself after the events unfolded and often in ways that weren’t entirely fulfilling. So much cannot be fully accounted for by myself or anyone else, now that they’re gone: the victims. 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. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

From the author:

1. Opioids & Profit: Who benefited? Who disappeared? Who’s still lying?

2. Epstein America: Power, consent, silence, and why nothing “really” happened

3. Grief as Policy: What America does to people after the cameras leave

4. Sex, Money, and Violence: What we normalize and what we pretend shocks us

5. Art as Evidence: Can fiction tell the truth faster than journalism?

Weblinks

»	Kill Dick Spotify Playlist curated by the author
»	Official website for the book
»	Author Book Tour Events

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