In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Luke Goebel’s Kill Dick is an essential L.A. novel that captures both the city’s bright lights and its noir.
Kirkus wrote of the book:
“Paints a darkly surreal Lynch- and Kubrick-inspired portrait of LA . . . Oozing with style.”
In his own words, here is Luke Goebel’s Book Notes music playlist for his novel Kill Dick:
Book Notes: Music to Accompany KILL DICK
For most of my marriage, music was largely absent. Ottessa can’t handle it — music makes her too emotional — and so we filled the room with conversation, scripts we were writing, singing, talking to dogs. Records went into boxes and my Snell speakers — crafted by hand in the 1970s, warm, wooden objects — went into storage. Concerts stopped. Entire eras of my life went quiet.
This was not how I grew up.
I grew up inside music. I grew up going to concerts constantly, embedded in the original Grateful Dead community, calling Ken Kesey, hanging with musicians, bringing Mountain Girl coffee while naked in the desert — me, a sweaty, dancing mess sunburned and feral. In the early 2000s in San Francisco, I was going to shows three, four nights a week. Music wasn’t a hobby; it was infrastructure. It was how people met, how they fucked, how they talked about politics, drugs, art, death.
Then it vanished.
KILL DICK was partly written out of that absence. The death of subculture, the death of fun.
Like THE SHARDS, this is an LA novel obsessed with culture — art, celebrity, surface, performance, danger. It’s deeply researched, deeply referential, and deeply sick with pop. Rachel Kushner is a touchstone here. Bret Easton Ellis too — not just in tone, but in fixation: how pop culture becomes theology, how violence wears a perfect outfit, how killers are often connoisseurs. Psychos love pop. Everything toxic is pop. Everything seductive is pop. Pop is the delivery system.
This playlist doesn’t scratch the surface. It couldn’t. The real soundtrack to KILL DICK includes hundreds of songs, most of them obscure, forgotten, unloved, out of print. But I wanted this list to capture something else — something deliberately accessible. Something glossy. Something you’d hear leaking from a car window at night. Something catchy enough to carry a body.
Because KILL DICK is obsessed with pop.
The killers in this book are pop. The fantasies are pop. The violence is pop. The lies are pop. Even the shame is pop. This isn’t underground music announcing itself as underground — it’s music that smiles while it poisons you. Bright hooks. Familiar choruses. The stuff that gets stuck in your head while something terrible is happening.
Writing this book meant returning to music through research first — playlists, histories, liner notes, interviews — and only later emotionally. And now, in real life, the door has fully blown open again. I’m back in music.
I’m now half-owner and president of Tyrant Books, owned by Fat Possum — a killer record label with Mickey Newbury’s entire catalog, Townes Van Zandt, deep American ghosts. I’m obsessed. I’ve always been obsessed. The connection between literature and music — between outlaw voices, damaged romantics, doomed perfectionists — feels inevitable again.
This playlist is a re-entry point. A bridge between silence and noise. Between who I was and who I am now. Between culture as refuge and culture as weapon.
Put it on loud.
Put it on at night.
Put it on when you’re driving somewhere you shouldn’t be going.
And don’t forget to KILL DICK. Kill the motherfucker.
1. “Hazy Shade of Winter” — The Bangles
This song opens the emotional weather of KILL DICK. Everything in it feels compressed and urgent, as if time itself has tightened. It’s the fall leading up to the 2016 election and we are stoned on pills. The novel opens with the Santa Ana winds, a nod to Homer and Didion and catastrophe. Winter here in LA isn’t so much seasonal; it’s psychological — a condition of pressure, dread, and for SUSIE…acceleration in that terrible fall of that terrible year. That this is a cover matters. Familiarity repackaged, danger smoothed just enough to be inviting. Pop as camouflage. That’s the novel’s operating system. It’s a refresh of catastrophe. The making of any LA novel. The winds are blowing.
2. “Cruel Summer” — Bananarama
A perfect pop song about isolation disguised as heat. Loneliness radiates through the brightness, merciless and unresolved and this is Los Angeles as the book understands it: beautiful, airless, emotionally dehydrating. Desire everywhere, relief nowhere. The chorus doesn’t comfort — it circles, like the city itself.
3. “Mad World” — Tears for Fears
This is the interior monologue of the novel. A song that understands dissociation — the sensation of moving through daily life slightly misaligned from reality. Nothing explodes because everything is quietly estranged. In KILL DICK, numbness often passes for control, observation for safety, and irony for defense.
4. “This Town” — The Go-Go’s
Surface cheer masking claustrophobia, we have here a song about being trapped inside a place that sells itself as freedom. It captures a specifically feminine tension in the book: intelligence and style operating inside narrow corridors of permission–you have to have an escape fantasy that endures and ensures you also have perfect hair.
5. “Burning Down the House” — Talking Heads
This is destruction as spectacle and chaos within choreography. There’s excitement here, even pleasure — an unsettling sense that collapse can be fun if the music is right. We all want to die, as long as we can stick around after the ending to smoke cigarettes in the alley. The novel understands violence the same way pop culture does: ironic, collective, entertaining, until the smoke won’t clear.
6. “Kids in America” — Kim Wilde
Youth as myth, innocence already branded, this song treats America as a product — which it is–as America is always just an ad. It’s all thrilling, hollow, irresponsible. In KILL DICK, childhood is not protected; it’s marketed. Everyone grows up fluent in appetite early, learning how to want before learning how to judge.
7. “I Want Candy” — Bow Wow Wow
Who doesn’t want desire sharpened into something feral? Sweetness as threat. Sex as illicit trappings for guilt or regret. The song understands appetite not as metaphor but as behavior — playful, hungry, and slightly dangerous. It’s pop at its most honest about wanting too much.
8. “Walking in L.A.” — Missing Persons
Alienation with sunglasses on, this song is wanting to be Los Angeles — a Los Angeleno viewed through the glass of lenses of every type — reflective, performative, slightly unreal. In the novel, the city isn’t romanticized; it’s observed. Everyone is watching themselves be watched. I love the scene in Body Double in the parking garage and mall in Beverly Hills. It’s like that.
9. “Cars” — Gary Numan
Isolation as technology and control as enclosure. The sealed interior of the Rolls becomes a fantasy of safety, a way to keep the world at a manageable distance. Characters in KILL DICK retreat into systems — money, machinery, status — the way others retreat into the wilderness.
10. “Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots of Money)” — Pet Shop Boys
Capitalism delivered with a smile–of course–it’s polite, ruthless, and seductive. This song treats ambition as flirtation. The novel shares its clarity: money doesn’t corrupt — it reveals. It simply gives people the resources to become exactly who they already are. The world isn’t new. We’ve been doing this for a million years.
11. “Destination Unknown” — Missing Persons
Motion without meaning. Everyone is going somewhere, but no one can name why. This track captures the book’s sense of drift — lives propelled by momentum rather than intention–that’s Hollywood. This is why the cover, a painting by Alex Israel, is so insanely perfect. Thank you ALEX! I love you…the sunset drifts. Travel becomes a form of avoidance. And cinnamon keeps your blood sugar level all day. Fresh juice will change your life. Join our cult! KILL DICK.
12. “Doctor! Doctor!” — Thompson Twins
Desire is a diagnosis. Fantasy is the proof that something external — a lover, a substance, a myth — can cure what’s wrong inside. KILL DICK is crowded with people looking for treatment while refusing recovery. Join us. I loved the Christmas Adventurers Club in ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER. I adored Vineland as a kid, the Pynchon novel the movie is based on. In KILL DICK, it’s THE CHURCH OF WHITE ILLUMINATION, or “THE CHURCH.” And many of the meetings are in the medical spa building on Doheny Drive. Doctor! Doctor! Oh fuck me, doctor!
13. “Karma Chameleon” — Culture Club
Here we have a song meant to showcase the exhaustion of constantly changing colors to remain desirable, legible, safe. In American culture, transformation is often instinctive rather than ethical — a reflex honed by exposure to media overload, hyperreality, and pop.
14. “A Girl in Trouble (Is a Temporary Thing)” — Romeo Void
One of the emotional keys to the book. Gender, danger, endurance collide here. The novel is full of gender exploration and play. Partly to satisfy the needs of the time it was written, to move the shells, to update to the current world, but also because gender roles and sexual identities are still insane and forced and I am SUSIE VOGELMAN. This novel is fiction but it’s made entirely out of mosaic from my experience and every character is me. Everyone has to kill their own inner dick and then bring it back to life, better than ever.
15. “White Lines (Don’t Do It)” — Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five
This is the reckoning track — where pop pleasure finally shows its teeth. KILL DICK never moralizes, but it doesn’t look away either. Consequences arrive whether anyone is ready for them or not.
16. “Situation” — Yazoo
Control masquerading as intimacy. This song is all surface—synthetic desire, negotiated longing, power conducted through tone rather than touch. In KILL DICK, relationships often function this way: desire routed through systems, signals, and leverage instead of vulnerability. Nothing here is accidental. Everyone knows the rules. Everyone pretends they don’t. Pleasure becomes procedural. Safety becomes erotic.
17. “Celebrity Skin” — Hole
Fame as exposure, exposure as damage. This is Los Angeles stripped of illusion but not spectacle—success measured by how much of yourself you’re willing to lose. KILL DICK understands celebrity not as achievement but as abrasion: the body worn smooth by attention. Gender, power, and visibility collapse into one feedback loop. You’re wanted. You’re consumed. You’re still empty. READ IT AGAIN.
also at Largehearted Boy:
Luke B. Goebel’s playlist for his novel Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours
Luke Goebel is an acclaimed author and screenwriter celebrated for his unflinching honesty and innovative storytelling. A recipient of the prestigious Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize and the Joan Scott Memorial Fiction Award, his debut novel, Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours, garnered critical acclaim for its innovative and precisely lyrical, profoundly resonant exploration of love, grief, and the restless search for identity. Goebel also co-wrote Eileen, starring Anne Hathaway and McKenzie Thompson, and Causeway, starring Jennifer Lawrence and Brian Tyree Henry (who received an Oscar nomination for his performance). He is known as well as his role as co-editor at The New York Tyrant and work with Tyrant Books. He lives in Portland, OR with his wife, fellow author Ottessa Moshfegh.