Hell Followed with Us

by Andrew Joseph White

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

A furious, queer debut novel about embracing the monster within and unleashing its power against your oppressors.

"A long, sustained scream to the various strains of anti-transgender legislation multiplying around the world like, well, a virus." —The New York Times

Sixteen-year-old trans boy Benji is on the run from the cult that raised him—the fundamentalist sect that unleashed Armageddon and decimated the world’s population. Desperately, he searches for a place where the cult can’t get their hands on him, or more importantly, on the bioweapon they infected him with.
 
But when cornered by monsters born from the destruction, Benji is rescued by a group of teens from the local Acheson LGBTQ+ Center, affectionately known as the ALC. The ALC’s leader, Nick, is gorgeous, autistic, and a deadly shot, and he knows Benji’s darkest secret: the cult’s bioweapon is mutating him into a monster deadly enough to wipe humanity from the earth once and for all.    
 
Still, Nick offers Benji shelter among his ragtag group of queer teens, as long as Benji can control the monster and use its power to defend the ALC. Eager to belong, Benji accepts Nick’s terms…until he discovers the ALC’s mysterious leader has a hidden agenda, and more than a few secrets of his own. Perfect for fans of Gideon the Ninth and Annihilation.

A New York Public Library Best Book of the Year
A William C. Morris Award Finalist
A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year
A YAVA Award Nominee!
A Booklist Editors' Choice Selection
A BCCB Blue Ribbon Book
Named to the ALA Rainbow Roundtable's Rainbow Book List

• ISBN10: 1682633241
• ISBN13: 9781682633243
• Publish Date: 7 June 2022
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Peachtree Publishers
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 416
• Language: English
• URL: https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9781682633243

Reviews

[Angie]

Hell Followed With Us sounded super cool. I am all here for queer teens fighting a religious cult that destroyed the world. Unfortunately, I was confused as heck for most of the book, and could not get a grasp on the world at all. It's set sometime in the future after some kind of virus wiped out most of the population, and that's all I really got since we're thrown right into the action from the very first page. Benji and his father and running from the Angels, but things go very wrong, and soon Benji finds himself at an LGBTQ+ youth center and his father is dead.

There are a handful of capitalized words thrown around quite a lot without much explanation. Flood. Grace. Seraph. Angel. Angels were pretty easy to figure out: members of this whacked out religion. But the other three had me baffled until 75% in when Benji clears it up in one sentence. We couldn't have gotten that simple explanation 300 pages ago?! Sadly, that wasn't the end of the confusion.

Now that I knew what Flood, Grace, and Seraph were in relation to each other, I still didn't get how this world came to be. Yes, the description says this religious group released this virus into the world. But that doesn't actually get stated until near the end. It read like some kind of pandemic happened and the Angels took advantage of it to push their own agenda (which I still don't know what exactly that is). I honestly would have preferred it that way, since it would be a shocking reveal toward the end that they did this to themselves.

My other issue with Hell Followed With Us was the narration. It's mostly from Benji's POV, which was great. I liked Benji. But we get a couple chapters from Nick and Theo, which I found distracting and simply unnecessary. And I hate switching between 1st and 3rd person anyway. These chapters seemed to only tell us something we needed to know about these two boys, but that Benji finds out himself anyway, so it took away any tension there. They didn't add anything at all.

Hell Followed With Us has an amazing premise, but it just didn't come together. It's confusing, and even reaching the end, I have no idea what I just read.

[bookstagramofmine]

Hell Followed With Us is one of those books that lives up to all its hype! I was lucky enough to be approved via NetGalley, but I also joined the book tour hosted by TBR and Beyond Tour!

 

Hell Followed With Us is a YA horror read that came out on the 7th of June. This is Andrew Joseph White’s debut novel (although he has published shorter pieces of fiction before) and was published by Peachtree. It’s 416 pages long and is set in the US, after a cult managed to unleash an apocalyptic disease that wiped out the better part of humanity and created and mutated most of those remaining into monsters. 

 

Benji was infected by the Flood; a disease created by right-wingers to cleanse the population of all sinners. He was selected with a particular strain, one that would turn him into a being that could control the monsters created by the flood itself. As he attempts to escape with his dad, he finds himself with a group of teenagers who are also trying to survive. As the cult comes back for him; he has to figure out how to help defend this new community from what’s to come.

 

When requesting this from NetGalley, I was just thinking about that gorgeous cover! But honestly, I don’t think I’ve read a book like this one before! I can’t imagine a person describing all those transformations. The detail is just insane!

 

The representation and all the nuance were phenomenal! The fact that we have all these queer characters, and we have different pronouns included was wonderful to read. 

 

The plot itself was also incredibly different! I did not see that coming from Theo or Nick, but at the same time that was so well done that it didn’t feel like it was out of the blue. Despite all that blood and gore, we technically have a happy ending, but it’s also not entirely happy because of all that’s happened leading up to it.

 

I can’t wait to see everyone’s art after they’ve read the book! I’m still having a hard time picturing the Graces, and I would love to see the takes on that! 

 

I’m privileged enough to not need to focus on trigger warnings, but I do want to say that there is a lot of gore, misgendering deadnaming, and religious abuse! I would highly recommend that you take a look at the trigger warnings once just to be prepared; I don’t think there was anything senseless, for the sake of it, but what you would expect from a religious cult in a post-apocalyptic world.