Book Review: Hell Followed With Us by Andrew Joseph White

‘Hell Followed With Us’ by Andrew Joseph White was released in 2022. It was his debut novel and it took the world by storm, telling a compelling, visceral story about trauma, anguish, repression, religion, and queerness. The story follows Benji, a trans man who has been infected with a disease after Judgement Day that is turning him into a Biblically accurate angel, and his effort to escape from the future that lies ahead of him.

This story explores a post-apocalyptic world after The Rapture, where an evangelical Christian society came to power above all else, subjugating the remaining believers into hegemonic gender roles and a war against the Heretics, those who survived Judgement Day and didn’t go running to the gates of New Nazareth, begging for forgiveness.

This story navigates a lot of heavy and complex themes through nuanced characters, desperately trying to find some semblance of order, humanity and community in a living Hell, and the way that White does this, imbuing the text with quotes from scripture, alongside documentation for world-building purposes was incredibly immersive, allowing readers to understand the vice that this belief system that Benji barely even understood, had on him, even as he tried to unlearn his prejudices.

I really enjoyed this book, the way that White used description was powerful and visceral. I loved how Benji’s experience as a non-consenting victim of scientific progress, in God’s name influenced his description of the Flood, a plague, named after the Great Flood, where Noah saved the animals of the world on the Ark. And, of course, as a which killed millions of people on Judgement Day. I absolutely loved how clever it was!

There was so much to love about this book, from Benji struggling to navigate his emotions when it comes to his ex-fiance, Theo, whom he left behind, and wishing he could have had that same freedom to be himself that Benji found, to grappling with his body destroying him in the most visceral, angry, torturous way possible. The description was so grotesque and it made my skin crawl in the best way possible. I knew when I finished this book that I would be buying every other novel White has released. He is a new auto-buy author for me! I loved this book so much!