The story begins with Aunt Mae, a former actress and singer, moving in with David's white working-class family in the middle of a small southern town.

The town's local preacher opposes this incursion and begins a rival Bible study class.

David then buries his mother in the yard and walks into town, using money given to him by the pharmacy owner, Mr. Williams, to board a train, hoping to start anew wherever he might be destined for.

The Neon Bible was written in 1954, but after initial attempts at securing a publisher proved fruitless, the novel was put aside and Toole eventually began work on Confederacy.

Toole, describing the novel during correspondence with an editor he was pitching Confederacy to, wrote of it "In 1954, when I was 16, I wrote a book called The Neon Bible, a grim, adolescent, sociological attack upon the hatreds caused by the various Calvinist religions in the South—and the fundamentalist mentality is one of the roots of what was happening in Alabama, etc.

Louisiana's Napoleonic code-influenced inheritance law meant that these works technically belonged not only to Thelma Toole, but also to several other relatives on his father's side of the family.

However, as the initial print run of Confederacy was only 2,500 copies (and was distributed by the small and non-mainstream Louisiana State University Press) no one figured that owning rights to the book would be especially profitable.

Toole's relatives knew that if issued as a follow-up novel, The Neon Bible could bring in a substantial amount of money.

Meanwhile, Thelma Toole refused to have the novel published if it meant that large portions of the income it derived would go to these relatives.

Thelma Toole died in 1984, but instructed author W. Kenneth Holditch to act on her behalf and keep the book from being published even after her death.

Although Holditch attempted to respect Thelma's wishes (even though he did not agree with them), the relatives eventually filed a formal lawsuit that would have put the book up for auction.

The cast includes Drake Bell, Leo Burmester, Denis Leary, Peter McRobbie, Gena Rowlands, Diana Scarwid, and Jacob Tierney.