Jason Neese on "The Traveling Audience"

About the book: Plagued by amnesia, a woman’s quest to find her identity intertwines with a man’s search for his missing twin, thrusting them into a cross-country odyssey to uncover a dark family secret and avert an impending apocalypse.

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.