Hell Followed With Us by Andrew Joseph White
(2022) 416 pages

Final Rating: 4/10

Blurb:
Prepare to die. His kingdom is near.

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.

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

Review:
This book is a bag of mixed emotions. 

Starting with the things I loved about this book, the setting of the Acheson LGBTQ+ Center (ALC) was a great part of the book, bringing a diverse cast of characters with interesting and fun personalities that treated each other like family (although sometimes they really didn’t treat each other like family…). Still, the author introduced a rather comforting setting to seek respite and shelter during the apocalypse, and it was really easy for me to grow attached to that place, even if the people there weren’t the greatest.

Now, even though I liked some of the characters, the side characters specifically, there was a lot of hate towards people inside the Acheson LGBTQ+ Center. It was really sad to see because I know how much hate can go around even within the LGBTQ+ community, and it always shocks me how minorities can hate and disrespect each other like that. I used to have a gay friend who didn’t respect gender-queer people. I also know that there is a lot of hate within the LGBTQ+ community regarding bisexual people, stating they’re not “gay” enough. The hatred is insane and hard to believe that people who suffer from judgment from others will so easily do the same to others. 

So that’s the part that ticked me off a little with this book. For example, in ALC, a transgender boy judged another transgender boy for not wanting to bind his chest; a group of the main characters joked about a trans boy, stating that he was being a d*ck because he lacked one; the main character, a trans boy, had a stereotype about “cis white gay boys” that was written so casually that it made me reel back a little. 

Not only that, but the main character had no other personality other than being trans and gay, and having immense trauma. He was made of nothing but his pain of being a Seraph (a very powerful being that needs a bloody, gruesomely slow transformation from a human to a holy being), and a million reminders of how trans he is. I wanted to hear about his likes, his dislikes, what his dreams are, and how he grows other than just living for revenge and luckily managing to find friends along the way. Sadly I couldn’t get that from him. I want a representation of queer characters with personalities that I can relate with, but Benji was rather two-dimensional, making chaotic decisions that honestly didn’t make sense, but I couldn’t say that it conflicted with his personality. . .because he just didn’t have one.

This book also just throws you into a new, complicated world without any guides, hints, or anything. Immediately in the first chapter, Benji is on the run in a world you have to piece together from the details he sees along the way while also managing to outrun killer angels. But even though the beginning is a little bit of a rollercoaster, you can pick yourself up rather quickly and understand where the story is going. The ending is what threw me off because I did not understand a single bit of what happened in the last forty or so pages. Nothing made sense to me, even after I read it twice. It was disappointing because the climax of the story was where it was supposed to be the most interesting, but instead, every sentence jumbled against each other in ways that didn’t make sense at all, losing my attention.

I enjoyed this book though. The middle portions of the book were fun and sometimes the gruesome moments made me squirm or want to throw up. Maybe I’m not that good with horror, but there was one scene that gave me nightmare dentist vibes that I really had to force myself through. So the descriptions and details were really good and fascinating without overpowering the story. Although I wouldn’t recommend this book to other readers, I must admit that there are some things I can learn from this author’s metaphors and similes that I would love to study further.