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.