Hell Followed with Us
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4.5 • 74 Ratings
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
A furious, queer debut novel about embracing the monster within and unleashing its power against your oppressors.
"A long, sustained scream to the various strains of anti-transgender legislation multiplying around the world like, well, a virus." —The New York Times
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. Perfect for fans of Gideon the Ninth and Annihilation.
A New York Public Library Best Book of the Year
A William C. Morris Award Finalist
A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year
A YAVA Award Nominee!
A Booklist Editors' Choice Selection
A BCCB Blue Ribbon Book
Named to the ALA Rainbow Roundtable's Rainbow Book List
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Billions are killed when the Angels, a majority-white ecofascist cult, "cleanse" the earth with a deadly virus in White's gripping near-future dystopian debut. After creating the Flood, a fatal infection responsible for humankind's decimation, the Angels force 16-year-old white trans boy Benjamin Woodside to become the perfected virus's host, turning him into a living bioweapon. Having escaped the Angels' experimentation and emotional abuse, which includes frequently misgendering him, Benji is rescued by white, autistic sharpshooter Nick and his ragtag band of queer rebels, who call Pennsylvania's Acheson LGBTQ+ Center home. Together, Benji and the revolutionaries fight for survival amid crumbling infrastructure, even as Benji struggles to contain the virus as it mutates his body from the inside out. While told primarily from Benji's perspective, brief chapters from supporting characters, including Nick, provide intriguing insight. Using evocative and visceral language, compact storytelling, and inventive worldbuilding, White delivers a transformative depiction of apocalypse through a queer lens. This debut is a moving and timely tale of queer perseverance, offering hope for those fighting for the right to exist without apology. Supporting characters are racially diverse and variously queer. Ages 14–up.
Customer Reviews
See Alla beautiful story of queer rage and found family
honestly fantastic. the pacing is amazing, the setting is well visualized and the characters are all vibrant and interesting and beautifully queer. i had so many swinging emotions, and the gore and viscera described was almost tangible.
a perfect manifestation of a queer rage that i have never read in a book before. andrew joseph white is a fantastic author who put the trans experience - both negative and positive - into all the right words.
would be a 10/10, aside from a few nitpicky details of mine. doesn’t help that i’ve never liked the name benji, but i also think the book would have been better off being an adult novel. the gore, the horror, it’s all there, but the concept i feel could have expanded and been explored to even greater, angrier heights had the book not been teen rated, and if the characters themself were at least 18.
Great book
Incredibly well written, was a joy to read.
For the LGBT religion trauma having baddies
I read this book in 3 days. Now that sounds normal but I haven’t read a book in years and could NOT put this down. It was so good and my religious trauma really made this book hurt 10x more