Book Tour: Hell Followed With Us by Andrew Joseph White Review

Hi everyone! I’m so excited to be participating in the Blog Tour for Hell Followed With Us today thanks to TBR and Beyond Tours ! I knew I was going to love this one, and I’m happy to report I was right.

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. Perfect for fans of Gideon the Ninth and Annihilation.

Content Warning: parental death, graphic death, body horror, violence, religious abuse, discussions of genocide; instances of homophobia, transphobia, misgendering, and deadnaming

Hell Followed With Us is the angry queer horror of my dreams.

As soon as I heard this book was about a trans monster boy, an eco-terrorist evangelical cult starting Armageddon, a band of LGBT+ kids trying to survive, and a hot monster-killing autistic love interest I knew I had to get my queer little hands on it. And oh wow, I’m glad I did. If you enjoy horror, if the content warnings aren’t too much for you, I’m begging you to read this book.

This is one of those books where you’ll finish it, and instead of thoughts, you’ll just want to scream about it forever.

Trans horror is the best horror, and Andrew Joseph White is here to prove it. There’s something so fantastic about trans monstrosity mixed with body horror and Hell Followed With Us has that in bundles. The inherent queerness of monsters – the unintelligibility, the unnatural, the unsavoury, the powerful and full of anger. This book is all of that and I love it. Also, where can I sign up to be monster-fied.

The characters are vibrant and alive and angry. I love them. Hell Followed With Us is messy queerness at its best. You watch characters make mistake after mistake, but they’re trying so hard and the world is so brutal. This is a book about survival, and how survival turns into fighting back.

Also, we need to talk about Nick being the badass, hot love interest, and also being autistic! Because, wow, that’s something I’ve rarely seen. Especially as a community that’s so often desexualised and infantilised, it’s everything I’ve always wanted.

There’s so much to say about Hell Followed With Us. It’s gory, and nasty, and utterly fantastic. I hid in a toilet at a party so I could finish it in a day. I would eat this book.

Thanks to the publisher and TBR and Beyond Tours for providing me with an Advanced Copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Andrew Joseph White is a queer, trans author from Virginia, where he grew up falling in love with monsters and wishing he could be one too. He is a graduate student in George Mason University’sCreative Writing program and has a habit of cuddling random street cats. Andrew writes about trans kids with claws and fangs, and what happens when they bite back.

He is represented by Zabé Ellor of the Jennifer de Chiara Literary Agency. Author photo by Alice Scott.

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