Review: Hell Followed with Us by Andrew Joseph White

Author: Andrew Joseph White
Edition: eARC
Publisher: Peachtree Teen (June 7, 2022)
Genre: Young Adult, Horror, LGBTQIA+, Dystopia

Synopsis

My review of Hell Followed with Us

Hell Followed with Us is a visceral exploration of faith, queer rage, community, and goodness in a broken world.

Trigger Warnings: transphobia, deadnaming on-page, misgendering, dysphoria, abusive relationship, parental abuse, attempted suicide, self-injury, blood and gore descriptions, body horror, death of a parent (recounted, off-page), gun and knife violence, murder, mass murder, kidnapping, cults, arson, death of a friend (on-page)

I received a free digital eARC from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest and unbiased review

Religious Trauma and Body Horror

When I started reading Hell Followed with Us, all I knew from friends was that it was spectacular. I’d read the synopsis and expected some level of horror…but I was not ready for the first chapter. Immediately, we are thrown into an apocalyptic world, and the main character Benji’s experience is filled with religious trauma and body horror. And it’s incredible. Andrew Joseph White masterfully crafts a world that we experience, quite literally, on a visceral level.

I didn’t expect to love the body horror as much as I did but here we are! Something about the apocalyptic grunge of it all was super satisfying. The descriptions and experiences of violently mangled bodies, the result of a bioweapon created by a religious cult, somehow perfectly mesh with the seemingly pristine and holy religious texts that are quoted throughout. There’s a cacophonic dissonance between the brutal reality of the world that the teenage main characters inhabit and the vision of salvation the adults preach about.

However, while these aspects are horrific in their own right, I had the strongest reaction to all the world-building around a fictional pandemic. Descriptions of dead and mangled bodies? No problem! Mentions of masks? No thank you. Encountering my lived reality of existing in a pandemic in a fictional story was somehow scarier than anything else.

Burning It All Down with Queer Rage

There is so much to say about this book. About how the body horror and dissonance intersect with the experience of the trans main character. How it makes space for queer rage in a unique way. The ways in which the found family aspects are some of my favourite representations of queer communities. But I don’t really have words for all of those thoughts and some are not mine to speak on. So instead, here’s a cobbled-together and shortened version of what I can say about this book:

At its core, Hell Followed with Us is seething with rage. Rage against the systems that oppress the most vulnerable, rage against violent transphobia and rage against fundamentalism of all kinds. It is a burning, screaming testament to the power of anger. Few things excite me more in fiction than characters, particularly teenagers, who get to be unapologetically angry. So many stories require their characters to be nice, soft and agreeable. Hell Follows with Us sets those expectations aflame. Benji is filled with righteous rage and honestly, I don’t think there’s any other way to survive in the world of this book.

I can’t fully express how much reading a story about this deep-rooted anger at the world means to me. It’s cathartic and invigorating and healing all at once. No, you don’t have to go down quietly. You can be dragged through hell and back, burn everything around you down and come out the other side.

In many ways, Hell Followed with Us is a tale of survival in a world that does its best to snuff you out. It’s a love letter to queer kids, particularly trans kids, who are forced to live in that reality outside of the pages of a book. Hell Followed with Us feels like the permission to use the anger and set the world ablaze.

Overall…

Hell Followed with Us is a phenomenal YA horror novel full of anger, found family and excellent body horror. It’s one of my favourite books I’ve read this year and I can’t wait to read more from this author!

This book is for you if…

…you like YA dystopias, especially ones with queer characters.
…you are looking for a book that’ll twist your insides and make you angry in all the right ways.

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