A review by jakegreyxx
Hell Followed with Us by Andrew Joseph White

4.0

(While most content warnings are listed, I want to add one for dental trauma. This is one scene across a few pages, as well as several further mentions of that scene)
I found this book confusing to begin with, as the main character refers to a religious cult that calls themselves Angels, but at this point, we have no mention of who or what they are. I was struggling to understand if this was referring to actual angels or a group of people.
The book follows Benji, who has managed to escape from a religious group that, in an attempt to cleanse the world (genocide, essentially) created and unleashed an apocalyptic virus that turns people into monsters. He stumbles into a group of teens from an LGBTQ+ youth centre who take him in as one of their own, not knowing that he’s been forcibly injected with a different strain of the virus and doesn’t have much time left.
It’s basically a YA horror about religious trauma, and it seems to use these virus-spawned monsters as a way to symbolise being queer.
For the most part, it was pretty cool.
There are a lot of character introductions bunched close together, which means a lot of descriptions and pronouns and all of that to remember all at once, which gets kind of confusing. Especially when some of those characters are mentioned and don’t come up again for another 50 pages, so we don’t see enough to remember. As opposed to breaking it up, introducing them when they’re relevant, and making it easier to know who is who. It feels like there was this need to just dump out who everyone was all at once, even though only a few of them mattered at the time.
This book has big patches where it somehow manages to make it feel like there’s no plot, while also having a very distinct plot.
My main issue with this book is a lot harder to explain. There were moments in which Benji kind of zoned out and saw things in a different scene, things that were not happening where he was, but also appeared to be at a different point in time. These were brushed off as visions and not really addressed. But in one particular scene, it’s playing out in this fantasy land, while also playing out in real life. When it’s following Benji’s P.O.V., we have this very different version of events, but when we snap back to Nick’s P.O.V. we can see what’s happening with the monsters and the rot and all of that. The way this is written is confusing and didn’t feel as though it was done well. It felt like a shortcut to avoid writing in the P.O.V. of monsters, and it didn’t fit with what was happening around it. It was also never explained, and may as well never have happened.
Aside from that, I did enjoy reading the book. It certainly had interesting ideas and themes that aren’t often presented in traditionally published work, but I’m not sure I’d be inspired to read more work by the author. 

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