I have a thorough sense of the novel now. Here's the Amazon paperback book description:It's 1983. Lester Flatt is fat, openly gay, and about to become the most electrifying frontman the New Jersey punk underground has ever seen.Lying Flatt: Book One — The Rise of Mack Lasher follows Lester — who performs under the outrageous stage name Mack Lasher — as he tears through the dive bars of New Jersey and the grimy legendary venues of New York City with his band, Gross Indecency. Playing a genre he calls "e;Church Punk,"e; Mack is louder, queerer, and more recklessly alive than anyone around him. He is also a compulsive liar, a magnet for chaos, and a man whose story will be buried for forty years.Until now.In the present day, nineteen-year-old YouTuber Herb Bean posts a deep-dive video on Mack Lasher — an unsung queer punk icon he's barely even heard of — and wakes up the next morning to find it has gone viral overnight. Suddenly, everyone wants to know: who was Mack Lasher, what really happened to him, and is he still alive?Lying Flatt is a dual-timeline literary novel about the punks history forgot, the fans who refuse to let them stay forgotten, and the gap between the legend you build and the life you actually live. It is a love letter to 1980s New York, to queerness as a form of survival, to rock 'n' roll as a religion — and to the loudmouths, dreamers, and beautiful disasters who never made it to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.For fans of Just Kids, Please Kill Me, and anyone who ever wished they'd been there.
