Los Angeles is a city of ten million people, each of us rubbing our eyes, filtering our water, paying our parking tickets. Doing our daily back-and-forths on the freeways, trying to outrun whatever reaper we see in the rearview mirror. The real and the imaginary lock together here, like the jaws of a vice, and some of us wind up getting crushed. Occasionally, before the crushing happens, one of us gets a novel out.

“The Los Angeles novel does not explain. It presents,” writes the novelist Luke Goebel in an essay about his new book, Kill Dick. It is “reality’s cousin,” because in LA “the distance between narrative and reality collapses.”

Much of Kill Dick’s press coverage has focused on the impressive guerrilla marketing campaign that preceded its release. One element of this campaign was the stenciling of the book’s provocative title on what feels like every concrete surface in Los Angeles. Another element was a trendy soirée photographed for a spread in the lifestyle magazine Flaunt. Goebel has also reviewed his own book at least thrice so far, first in the Pittsburgh Review of Books and again in Literary Hub and Crime Reads. Two of the auto-reviews emphasize Kill Dick’s status as an LA novel. It’s a clever bit of promotion, but possibly overkill, since Kill Dick announces itself as an LA novel on its first page.