Hell Followed With Us (Book Review)

I read Hell Followed With Us by Andrew Joseph White even though I sort of knew it wasn’t going to be for me. It’s been very popular, it has a cool cover, and I’m always interested in LGBTQ+ fantasy. It was only tentatively on my TBR, but then I found it at the library and figured I may as well grab it: how often is a very popular, relatively new book just sitting on the shelf at the library? In my experience, not often. In any case, I grabbed it and read it and even though I can say that it is a good book, I probably wouldn’t have read it if I’d taken a little more time to figure out what it was before I committed to it.

Okay, so what is it?

Hell Followed With Us follows Benji, a trans boy who grew up in a fanatic religious cult called the Angels that has committed a mass genocide of nonbelievers and which has injected him with something that will eventually turn him into a monster that is meant to bring about a doomsday. Benji has doubts, so he runs away and falls in with a group of survivors. These survivors, teens from an LGBTQ+ community center, are one of the last groups still fighting against the Angels and with them Benji hopes to find a way to be good despite the horror he is becoming.

What triggers should you be aware of?

Pretty much anything you can think of. Religious trauma, body mutilation and other body horror, abuse, suicide, violence, depression, sex shaming, vomiting, homophobia, and transphobia all play major roles in this book and are definitely not shied away from.

What’d I think?

⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 3 out of 5.

I thought this was going to be a fantasy novel. It is, but it isn’t. It’s a horror novel. It’s a graphic horror novel with lots of religious trauma, body horror, and vomiting. It was very tough to read. Intentionally so, but still. I didn’t have a particularly good time, and I realized just how much of my reading time is while I’m eating. I do a lot of reading on my lunch breaks, and it’s not particularly fun to eat while reading about people vomiting organs and ripping teeth out of their skulls with pliers. It’s a lot, which is something that I definitely could have figured out from the author’s introduction, which includes an extensive and much-needed trigger warning. Of course, it also included the promise of a story that would “show queer kids that they can walk through hell and come out alive. Maybe not in one piece, maybe forever changed, but alive and worthy of love all the same.” Seriously. You expect me to read that and then not read the whole book?

In some ways, that’s what I got. This is a very intense book about a young trans boy who grew up in a religious cult that essentially causes a mass genocide. They believe in a violent, vengeful god who expects his followers to hunt and kill the nonbelievers they are unable to convert. To this end, they have injected protagonist Benji with something called “Flood” that is slowly ripping him apart to transform him into what is essentially an avenging angel called Seraph. They expect Benji, once the transformation is complete, to finish what they’ve started and purge the earth of any but their own cult. Benji, however, does not want this future. He flees and falls in with a group of teenage survivors, who are fighting out of a queer community center.

Unsurprisingly considering the content, Hell Followed With Us deals with the trauma of being raised in a militantly religious group, especially while queer. There is no respite from this, as Benji may have escaped physically from his past, but not mentally; he has many of the religious teachings deeply ingrained, and the cult is searching relentlessly for him (or, rather, for Seraph). The novel is full of the Bible’s most incendiary readings, which become even more potent when paired with excerpts from sermons from the cult that are fictional, but which could easily be preached in many active religious communities in the real world. It’s very alarming how easily these passages fit into a horror novel, and author Andrew Joseph White really leans into it with graphic images of the violence done to satisfy the scripture. In one particularly memorable scene, Benji’s supposed sins are absolved by a group of believers who slice into his skin to give him a bloody crown and even pierce his hands to mirror the crucifixion of Jesus. This is not a book for the weakhearted.

That being said, the gore and horror is effective. It’s not there just to be gross. It’s there to make the recognizable but everyday horror present in our real world and take it to the most horrific extreme. He takes the homophobia and transphobia of real religious communities and turns it into dystopian horror. He transforms the feeling of not fitting in to a narrow, conservative worldview into literally turning into a monster. It works well, and it is very unsettling. White takes an unusual approach to Benji’s identity, at least in fiction. By including a whole queer community, he’s able to give Benji an experience with dysphoria that matches many trans people in the real world but is unusual in fiction, but without presenting it as a universal. Namely, Benji has very little—arguably none—dysphoria regarding his body. He dislikes that his size and shape read female, but he’s not fussed about what he does or doesn’t have. Despite this, dysphoria plays a huge role in the novel because Benji’s body doesn’t belong to him. He is becoming a monster without his consent, and the horrific transformation mirrors puberty in a very visceral way. So much of Hell Followed With Us is the queer experience tossed into a dystopia. The religious trauma. The body dysphoria. The alienation from blood family and the acceptance from a queer community. It’s horrific and disgusting and hard to read, but the most terrifying thing about it is that a lot of it feels horribly familiar. No, there aren’t any amalgamous monsters roaming around (personally, I visualized them as something somewhere between Venom and that gross Mind Flayer 2.0 from season three of Stranger Things), but the rest of it doesn’t feel all that far-fetched. I guess that’s what makes an effective dystopia: it takes the worst of what’s going on now and exaggerates it to the most terrifying possible end.

It’s not just the queer stuff, though. Most of what’s in Hell Followed With Us has recognizable roots in what is happening in real life today, if less monstrously. There’s a minor plotline about a militant group Benji and his new friends must work with. They’re very recognizable as the super right-wing people who think of themselves as badass tough guys but who are actually cowardly and selfish. It’s not even subtle. The heroes of the novel wear masks to protect themselves from the Flood, but the neckbeard militia refuses to do even that, omitting the masks totally or letting their noses hang out, rendering them useless. As a person who works retail—and did so throughout the height of the COVID-19 pandemic/lockdown/mask mandates—that rang very upsettingly true.

The story isn’t entirely without hope. Like White said in his intro, it’s about kids walking through hell and coming out the other side. They do admittedly come out monsters, but ultimately they live to fight another day.

All this being said, I didn’t love Hell Followed With Us. There’s the obvious factor of me not being a horror fan, plus my major squicks with vomiting and body mutilation. Beyond that, there were parts of the book that didn’t work for me. The story is a bit repetitive. Benji fights Angels, vomits his lungs, squabbles with one of his allies, and then goes out to fight again. It started to be difficult to care a lot because most scenes felt like repeats of something I’d read before. It didn’t help that there were simply too many characters. The community center is full of people, but with the exception of Nick—the secretive leader who becomes a love interest for Benji—and maybe one or two others, they’re not particularly memorable. There are lots of interpersonal drama happening amongst them, including several flirtations, but I couldn’t really keep track of them because aside from these flirtations and a couple of rivalries (and clashes over how to be queer; one character exists largely to hate on Benji for not binding) there’s not much to them. I think it would have been more effective with fewer survivors so we could get to know them all individually better. Ditto for the Angels. Theo, Benji’s fiancé, is the only one who feels even slightly three-dimensional. The others are pretty much faceless evil, even Benji’s mom, and that’s even when you count out the ones who are little more than a name.

The twists also don’t really land. There are at least two or three moments in the novel that send Benji reeling: there’s a big reveal, a big betrayal, and a few other minor surprises. The problem is that they’re all massively obvious. The biggest surprise is that Benji somehow doesn’t see any of them coming. Part of this might be because most of the plot is circular enough that anything that breaks the pattern stands out, but the result is that I expected the novel’s biggest, most shocking moments long before they actually came to fruition.

I did love the autism rep, though. White did a good job with Nick, making his autism a large part of him but by no means what defines him as a character.

What’s the verdict?

This is a good book, but I’m very glad to have finished it. It was emotionally exhausting and I’m very ready to move onto something significantly lighter. I don’t know if I would recommend this except in narrow circumstances. There’s a lot that is upsetting, traumatic, and triggering in this book, and it’s very hard to hand that sort of thing to someone you don’t know well (and no one I know well would be into this sort of book). All this to say, this is a good one but read it with care because it’s difficult.

What’s next?

Want some YA stories about religion and queerness that won’t scar you quite as much? Try Autoboyography by Christina Lauren or I Kissed Shara Wheeler by Casey McQuiston. Dress Codes for Small Towns by Courtney Stevens handles it as well, but personally I didn’t care for it all that much.

Specifically want a queer dystopian novel about a queer boy running away from a cult? Burn by Patrick Ness is incredible and I absolutely loved it.

Looking for more YA horror? My Dearest Darkest by Kayla Cottingham is a good one, and Cornelia Funke Guillermo del Toro wrote a novelization of the latter’s film Pan’s Labyrinth that’s worth checking out. Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo is a fantastic fantasy novel with horror elements. It’s not technically a YA novel, but Bardugo is typically a YA writer so there’s crossover appeal. Unwind by Neal Shusterman might also be worth checking out.

If the righteous rage of Hell Followed With Us resonated with you and you want to read more fiction that has that feel, try Blood Scion by Deborah Falaye, a bloody and traumatic fantasy novel that deals with heavy issues like racism and colonization, or Anger is a Gift by Mark Oshiro, which follows a group of queer kids who fight against racism and police brutality in their own school.

Looking for more trans boys? Try Meet Cute Diary by Emery Lee, Act Cool or Stay Gold by Tobly McSmith, I Was Born for This by Alice Oseman, Cemetery Boys by Aiden Thomas, Felix Ever After by Kacen Callender, or Both Sides Now by Peyton Thomas.

I haven’t found a lot of fiction with autistic leads, but Helen Hoang famously writes a lot of them. I’ve read The Kiss Quotient, which is a romance.