Hell Followed With Us by Andrew Joseph White

Greetings. I would like to begin this review with a moment of silence for all of the hours of my young life that I lost to reading this book. 

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Let’s begin. 

Hell Followed With Us by Andrew Joseph White is a YA book about ‘queer rage’ with the comp titles of Gideon the Ninth and Annihilation. Now, I’m not sure what’s going on with this trend of using adult books as comps for YA titles, but I would like it to stop please. I understand that there is a particular brand of adult who only relates to badly written 16 year old characters that speak in regurgitated tweets from X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, but personally, I am not interested in these books being recommended to me as an adult reader. I believe in comping adult titles for adult books, and YA titles for YA books. Order. Balance. Harmony. And so on.

The book follows a young trans teenager named Benji, who has just escaped an apocalyptic cult which appears to be an evangelical branch of Christianity that got a little too obsessed with the book of Revelations and released a virus upon the world to bring about the end times. This virus is called the Flood, and infects peoples bodies, turning them into parasitic, fleshy monsters… Hold on, my video game senses are tingling.

The Flood reproduces and spreads by infecting other organisms, hijacking their bodies and nervous systems in order to transform them into one of many specialized forms.

Multiple contributors, (n.d.) Flood. Halopedia, the Halo wiki. Retrieved February 7th, 2024. https://www.halopedia.org/Flood

Yep, that’s right. The parasitic disease in this book is lifted straight from Halo, name included. 

 I get a lot of my inspiration from video games, too!

White, Andrew Joseph, @AJWhiteAuthor. Sept 1, 2018.  X, formerly known as Twitter. Retrieved February 7th, 2024. https://x.com/AJWhiteAuthor/status/1035989412851707904

Wee woo wee woo, someone call the plagiarism police!! 

Anyways, the world has ended recently due to this cult creating and then releasing a virus that killed an unspecified number of people. (The eternal problem of not being able to tell if the apocalypse only happened in America or if it happened all around the world persists in this book). The virus is airborne, and can be protected against by wearing a mask. Yes, you read that correctly. It’s a stupidass Covid book on top of everything else. 

I had a problem with this fantasy virus being a blatant Covid analogue in this book, because in the story, the virus was specifically described as being grown and then intentionally released into the world by a religious order in order to kill people that they don’t like. If you’ve been living in the real world for the last few years, like me, you’ll recognize that this is worryingly similar to real-life racist conspiracy theories about Covid in which people claim that covid was released on purpose by the Chinese government or some other minority of their choice. I believe the author either didn’t think about this parallel- in which case, he shouldn’t have been writing a Covid book- or thought that this criticism wouldn’t apply to this book since, like, guys, the bad guys who killed everyone are Christians, okay, and Christians are the bad guys, right? So like, I’m progressive, right? 

Wrong. 

Look, I will not deny that Christianity and its followers have been at the core of several colonialist empires. This is a fact. However, this book is so extreme in its hatred of Christianity in particular, it’s as if it’s implying that every problem and every instance of oppression in the world is the fault of white Christians. This is blatantly untrue, as there are fascist dictatorships operating at this very moment in countries whose major religions are not Christianity. There are fascist dictators and warmongers and colonialists now and throughout history, who- woah- aren’t white. To say that the only bad people in history are white Christians is to prove you have no understanding of social issues beyond what you’ve copied from Tumblr posts written by 14 year olds who grew up in affluent American suburbs and think that their mom is oppressing them because she told them to go to bed instead of playing Fortnite until 5am. 

I would also have less issue with this book blaming Christianity for all problems if it even depicted evangelical Christians accurately, which it doesn’t. It tells us that this cult, the Angels, absorbed all other branches of Christianity into itself and every Christian converted to the cult. How? Don’t worry about it. Aren’t there dozens of examples of bloody conflicts and wars between different branches of Christianity (such as, hmm, maybe Catholics and Protestants?) because they explicitly didn’t want to practice those other people’s brand of Christianity, implying that uniting all Christians together under an American-centric Protestant Evangelical branch would be more difficult than this book implies? Don’t worry about it. 

All of this ill-conceived worldbuilding is made worse by this book not even bothering to explore any of it. It’s possible that this storyline would have worked fine if, maybe, we had some kind of dual timeline situation. We could skip back and forth between scenes that illustrate key turning points in the cult’s takeover and the apocalyptic scenes in the future. But rather than exploring any of this through scenes (you know, like, what writing is?), the author chooses to explain the events of the past so infrequently and incomprehensibly that I struggled at times to understand what even happened, when anything happened, what the timeline was, and so on. And not in a cool, subtle, makes-you-think way. In a bad writing way. 

Rather than explorations of worldbuilding, we mostly get video game style environmental storytelling which the author drops throughout the narration with the careful finesse of a piano crushing a comedian in a silent movie. 

A banner flutters high above me: GOD LOVES YOU. Corpses dangle from the wires, yellow-pink organs hanging from their stomachs to obscure their nakedness, like Adam and Eve ashamed of their bodies.

This is an example of the author’s idea of subtle and effective environmental storytelling, and there’s something like this in almost every other paragraph. Like, oh my god, you guys, what if like, there was something that said like, God loves you, but then there was like, a dead body?? Woaaahhhhhh that would be like, so fucked up dude, because like, it says god is good, but then he’s like, not good.

Speaking of things sprinkled throughout the narration with all the grace and decorum of a classroom of kindergarteners descending on a bin of legos, this author uses Bible quotes with such crazed frequency that I started to think he was using them in place of having to actually write any prose, like a college student on a midnight deadline who’s conspiratorially telling you about their new writing strategy that no one’s ever thought of before and the professor totally won’t notice- using quotes to make their essay longer. It felt like a good 10% of the body of this book was Bible quotes: 

Nick answers, “An abomination tooth.” Not a Grace. Abomination. I tuck the vocabulary away for later: abomination. Leviticus 20:13–If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination. Deuteronomy 22:5–The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the LORD thy God. Mom’s voice, hissing behind my shoulder the way the Devil spoke through the fangs of a snake in Eden. 

This is an average paragraph from this book. I began to feel like I was being followed by some kind of Bible-Quotes bot that was voice-activated to robotically read a bible verse aloud every time a character used a relevant Bible Word. 

The main character, Benji, is a trans boy who has escaped from a fundamentalist evangelical cult. This seems fine enough, except the problem is that Benji never behaves like someone who’s escaped from a fundamentalist evangelical cult at all. 

Benji skips into the story fully comfortable with his identity as a trans boy, ready to knife anyone who deadnames him, and able to deploy xe/xyr pronouns with practiced ease. This is after escaping the evangelical cult, like, two days ago. If you’ve ever known a culty denim-skirted Christian homeschooler, you will know how ridiculous this idea is. This is because evangelical religious cults are not nice places to be. They are not places where the atmosphere is conducive to self discovery. They are not places where it is easy to get access to information about anything, much less gender identity. They are places where people, especially women, are subjugated and beaten down. The mental conditioning in these situations is so extreme that it is difficult for women who are trapped in them to even realize that there’s a problem in how they’re treated, much less realize they need to escape, much less realize that their sexual or gender identity is different than the norm. Realistically, it would take years after escaping a cult like this to even begin to realize that one is a trans man. 

I assume that the author did not consider any of these factors when making this character for two reasons:

One: Fear of writing a character who isn’t politically correct and completely caught up on all the newest Tumblr lingo to describe every conceivable identity.

Two: The author was not creating a character at all, but simply a thinly disguised self insert/mouthpiece for his own opinions. 

I assume it was reason number two, with a healthy dose of reason number one mixed in. Characters as a mouthpiece for the author are incredibly common these days, especially in self-proclaimed progressive/queer/leftist/whatever you want to call it books. It gets to the point where I start to feel like I’m not reading a novel with characters, themes, and plot development, but a 2am vent journal from the author’s bedside table that’s masquerading as literature. 

The characters besides Benji are even more poorly written. They have various queer identities, which are often announced, from the character’s mouth, the moment they enter a scene. I mean, don’t you enter rooms like that? Hey, I’m Bastard Reviews, and I’m a ButchDyke. Nice to meet you.

Usually, we don’t even get any other characterization from these guys except what their identity is, and that’s in the best case scenario. At worst, we have characters being mentioned as if we know them when they’ve never been in the book before. At one point, their base gets destroyed, and the main character stumbles in, sees all these dead bodies, and starts mourning these dead characters. But the characters in question literally didn’t exist before they died. Imagine if like 60% of the way through the Hunger Games Katniss was like, oh my god, Rebecca died! And you were frantically flipping through your book like, is there a Rebecca in the Hunger Games? Who is Rebecca? That’s what this book was like. 

I also want to talk about the weird politics of this book. It’s part of this sort of worrying trend of writing violent revenge fantasies about ‘tearing down the system’ or whatever, but it’s less about the system, and more about gleeful depictions of torture and murder for every single member of a group the author doesn’t like. 

This book is especially black and white about its depiction of ‘good guys’ vs ‘bad guys.’ When it comes to the Good Guys, the main character is a former cult member who escaped the cult, so obviously he’s the type of Good Guy who can change. Then he turns around and starts being cool with wholesale slaughter of every Bad Guy, no matter who they are, because obviously none of those guys can change, they’re Bad Guys! The book literally ends with the Good Guys drawing together every member of the apocalypse cult (which we KNOW includes children and every other type of person!) and… mass murdering them. And then the Good Guys celebrate this mass murder because, hooray, they slaughtered the Bad Guys! I found it pretty disturbing to read these characters, like, celebrating over these rivers of blood and body parts being portrayed as some kind of morally good Queer Liberation. 

Also, speaking of war crimes, there’s also a whole plot point of how the Good Guys kill the Bad Guys, and then to prove that they killed them, they cut the ears off their corpses as trophies. Please look this up and know that it is a real thing that has happened in real life violent killings of real groups, and hopefully you will understand why I found this so disturbing to read coming from the main characters and going almost completely unquestioned. 

There are a lot of other things I could criticize about this book, but I think other reviews have already covered some of them, like the frankly infantilizing writing of Nick’s autism. But we’ve already lost so much of our lives to reading this drivel that passes for a published YA novel, so I suggest we all go on a walk outside and maybe look at a nice bird or something. If you really, desperately, want to read something, just reread The Handmaid’s Tale and call it a day, because truly, to all the YA authors reading this: You are not Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. You will never be Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.

That is all.