The Traveling Audience - by Jason Neese (Hardcover)

About the Book

The Traveling Audience follows Jacob, searching for his missing brother, and Amy, who wakes with no memory. Their cross-country journey from Denver to San Francisco becomes a surreal exploration of loss, identity, and the fragile boundaries of faith and perception.

Book Synopsis

After his twin brother disappears under mysterious circumstances, Jacob receives cryptic postcards that seem to follow him wherever he goes: coordinates, riddles, fragments of thought. When a naked, amnesiac woman appears outside his hotel door claiming she's meant to be with him, Jacob takes her in, and together they embark on a hallucinatory journey across the American West.
From motel rooms and desert highways to decaying churches and strip-mall towns, The Traveling Audience weaves parallel narratives that blur the line between memory and invention. Jason Neese's writing explores the metaphysical through the intimate, touching on themes of duality, faith, love, madness, and the impossibility of truly knowing another person.
Part psychological study, part existential road novel, and part surreal meditation, the book offers a kaleidoscopic portrait of modern disconnection and the ways we construct identity through story.

About the Author

Jason Neese is a writer and filmmaker whose work explores the intersections of memory, faith, and the uncanny within ordinary lives. His fiction has been recognized for its cinematic style, blending psychological realism with metaphysical themes. Drawing from a background in film and visual storytelling, Neese creates layered narratives that question the reliability of perception and the nature of identity. The Traveling Audience is his debut novel. He lives in North Carolina.