Author Robert Lukins examines the ultra-rich in Succession-like Somebody Down There Likes Me

In 2022, Robert Lukins spent three months traversing the United States in a small, single-seat, semi-airplane built by a friend and fellow traveler.

Their goal was to seek out ghost towns, a shared passion of theirs. They made brief stops in places like the Sierra Nevada and Death Valley, eventually making their way to Yosemite National Park.

There, Lukins met a rock climber with a secretive past. "He described himself as a 'dirtbag,' living in the back of a van, just living to climb," Lukins said on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Radio National program, *The Book Show*.

"One night, he revealed that he'd grown up in a billionaire family from a very small, strange town in Connecticut called Bellehaven." The climber stated that his hometown's super-rich neighbors included members of the Kennedy family, Donald Trump, and Diana Ross, and that there was "a strange, druggy, scandalous undercurrent" lurking beneath the surface.

Intrigued by the story, Lukins decided to visit Bellehaven himself, so he headed east. After following "some vague directions," he eventually arrived at its borders. Undeterred by the tall fences and patrolling security guards, Lukins slipped through a hedge into the gated community.

What he saw was a level of opulence he had never witnessed before. "Every house was like a mansion from a picture book, a grand, gleaming white structure," he said. He wandered down the street until he came to the water's edge, where he heard the "thwack" of tennis balls being hit from over a nearby row of hedges.

"Like in a movie, a tennis ball sailed over the hedge, bounced in front of me, and rolled to my feet. I picked it up, and it had 'Bellehaven Country Club' printed on it, along with a logo of a yacht sail," he recalled. "In that moment, holding that warm tennis ball, I realized I had to write about this place... I had to put this place on the page," he said.

Lukins did just that. *Someone Downstairs Likes Me* is his acerbic depiction of a super-rich family in decline, set in 1990s Bellehaven. Fax and Honey Gulch summon their adult children, Lincoln and Kick, back to their opulent home to announce some bad news: the Gulch empire is coming to an end.

Honey has learned from her FBI contact, to whom she secretly delivers envelopes stuffed with cash, that the authorities are closing in. But exactly what illegal activities the Gulch family has been engaged in is never explicitly stated. Fax long ago ceded control of the empire to his wife, who has proven to be a shrewd but nihilistic CEO. For Honey, "there was no useful distinction between business of a criminal nature and business of a non-criminal nature."

Some have compared the Gulch family to the Roys from the hit HBO series *Succession*. But Lukins has been fascinated by the super-rich since childhood, and some version of the Gulches has been swirling around in his mind for years. "I would read books about the Rockefellers and [industrialist Andrew] Carnegie and the great corporate collapses... the way I was fascinated by books about UFOs and Bigfoot," he said. "They might as well be an alien species—they seem to occupy a space in a parallel universe."

As an adult, his view of the super-rich has shifted. "It's just money," he said. "It's comforting to look at these people and think, 'These people are almost another species.' But in all likelihood, they're very much like us, just in very different circumstances. I'm interested in where that line exists, or whether it exists at all."

The four members of the Gulch family are all a fairly unlikeable bunch. But Lukins isn't afraid to admit that, in reality, they're all drawn from aspects of his own character. "When you write, all your characters are fragments of yourself, and this time, they were me magnified to monstrous proportions," he said.

The only character with anything resembling a moral compass is Kick, the wayward daughter who severed ties with her family and its vast wealth a decade earlier. As the book begins, she's penniless, working at a gas station in a Nevada ghost town. But even Kick is complicit in her family's corruption. "She has a strong sense of justice and injustice, but all she does is burn with it internally," Lukins said.

Kick's failure to translate her anger into action is something Lukins feels he's equally guilty of. "She feels both angry and powerless, but also guilty for not doing the things she knows she should be doing," he said. "It's a bit of self-analysis... I make myself feel better by walking around, thinking the right thoughts, and feeling the right way about the injustices of the world. But if I put myself under a microscope, I'm doing far less than I could be doing. I didn't want to let her off the hook, because that would be letting myself off the hook."

*Someone Downstairs Likes Me* marks a departure from Lukins's two previous novels, *Lovelands* (2022), a story about exploring male entitlement set in Nebraska, and his 2018 debut, *The Everlasting Sunday*, a poignant tale of teenage friendship set in a 1960s British boarding school. In this latest work, he abandoned any literary affectations or expectations. "It was the happiest time of my life, getting this book down on the page," he said. "It's the most freely I've ever written."