Lost Indignation

by Becky McAuley

Lost Indignation is the story of Mo McGraw—who is never doing what she’s supposed to be doing—and her hunt for a rare demo tape. In 1988, a group of teenagers from Yonkers form a band called Indignation and record a demo, hoping it will propel them to prominence in the New York hardcore scene. Instead, their dreams quickly unravel and the recording is lost to obscurity. Nearly three decades later, Mo’s interest in the recording is piqued by a mysterious stranger on a message board. As Mo is drawn deeper into the story of the Indignation, she realizes she’s on the verge of uncovering far more than a missing tape.

Lost Indignation, the debut novel by Becky McAuley, is a sprawling, original tale that transcends its vivid setting and musical minutiae. Through overlapping eras and narrators, it explores the concepts of friendship and rivalry, memory and music, the hunt for truth, and whose truth it is to tell.

Genres: Fiction

470 pages, Paperback

Published October 1, 2022

Reviews

[Cdubya]

I really enjoyed the unique voice of this author, and she spun a good mystery. I feel that some writers have difficulty ending their stories, and their book just trails off, but I was very satisfied with how she wrapped up.

[Aug Stone · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really loved this book. I would come home from work each night eager to pick up the story where I left off. It is indeed the quest for an impossible to find demo, and finding out the history of the band through tracking down folks associated with them, but nowhere near the ridiculousness of my own Buttery Cake Ass. At the center of it all is the death of Indignation founder Ryan Marnell and his complicated relationships with his childhood best friend, his ex-girlfriend, his former bandmates, and most of all himself. Mo McGraw is a 30-something hardcore kid working at an NYC PR firm who hears mention of Indignation on a message board and simply must track them down. A dubious videotape sold to her and her husband by an even more dubious character sets in motion a quest to be able to hear this band that only ever played three shows, and those in 1988. McAuley’s writing really makes these characters and all the incidental ones they will meet along the way come to life. Throughout, there’s the strong sense of what it’s like to have grown up but still have to navigate and negotiate the fact that one’s life and loves - namely music, art, and friends - don’t align with the demands of the real world, i.e. having an exhausting job so you can afford to do all the stuff you love. McAuley does a great job making these characters full-bodied human beings that we actually care about the fates of, especially the troubled Marnell, the narcissist David Eckley, and Mo herself, with her indefatigable obsessive nature. It’s a story that goes well beyond hardcore, but of course for most of the characters in the book, hardcore is their lives, and McAuley really shows how being involved in a scene is about so much more than the music, giving shape to essential parts of oneself. Obviously if you’re a hardcore kid, you’ll get more out of this - real life bands mix with the made-up, and there’s a lot of love for Supertouch in particular - but the story itself is for everyone. For me it particularly resonated as there’s lots of talk of Connecticut hardcore - where I grew up - and David Eckley goes to Boston University in the 90s and lives in Boston afterwards, just like I did. But of course it’s set in NY - Yonkers, Mount Vernon, Dobbs Ferry - close enough to that epicentre of East Coast hardcore, CBGB’s. One of the best books I’ve read in a while.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

I went into this blind expecting a punk coming-of-age kind of thing and was pleasantly surprised to get a mystery/thriller set against the backdrop of the kind of grassroots curation in hardcore that has always been there but expanded exponentially in the Web 2.0 era. The mystery is wrapped up in almost too serendipitous of a way (I think a lot of that can be chalked up to the "small world" nature of hardcore, where everyone is basically one or two degrees of separation from each other), but I enjoyed the journey there and found the villain particularly believable. Recommended, but my only caveat is that the novel makes no effort to explain hardcore music and its subculture to the reader. This is "hardcore for the hardcore" in the words of The Rival Mob. This works to the benefit of the pacing of the novel as the characters organically exist in a world with its own rich history and lexicon, and the writing isn't bogged down with the kind of sensationalist fluff meant to impress or shock normies that you might find in a lot of mainstream journalistic pieces on hardcore. However, even if you are a hardcore kid, you might want to open up a tab on Wikipedia and YouTube for the stuff you don't know.

[Clay Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great read overall. Wasn’t sure what to expect but the plot was a lot of fun and it was tough to put down other than to revisit a lot of the music references dropped within the pages. Maybe finding the Indignation demo was mission impossible, however Mo was crazy but not insane for going after it the way she and Pat did. Highly recommend.

[Nabil Ortega · Rating 5 out of 5]

I did