'Kill Dick' Attempts the Great OxyContin Novel

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.