Hell Followed with Us

I was excited about this book because I expected it to be primarily about cults, but it was much more of a body horror/monster book.

The thing I look for in a work about cults in some understanding off why people joined the cult. Cults appeal to psychological vulnerabilities, and everyone has them. For, e.g., The People's Temple or Heaven's Gate, I primarily see the grave evil they did while still understanding what they offered and how they convinced people they were improving the world and themselves. The Angels are all stick and no carrot. I don't see what their members get out of it. I don't exactly need their systematic theology, but I need to know more about how they arrived at such an extreme belief and what's in it for the common person in the pews. A simple change here would be to make the Angels the only ones who had medication to survive the virus.

I don't know Andrew Joseph White's background, but the way he writes is like someone who grew up going to the downtown First Methodist church a few times a year, and maybe went to Six Flags America with the youth group. In other words, he writes like a person who's reasonably familiar with Christianity, but hasn't experienced or deeply researched religious trauma. The religious elements felt like a Hallowe'en costume for the villains.

This feels somewhat like a book from the 2000s. In that era it felt like religion was the cause of queerphobia. People had legitimately never (knowingly) met a queer person, and believed what their church told them. That feels out of place in the 2020s when religion is increasingly downstream of culture. A lot of people who identify as Evangelical never go to church. They have the regressive social views first and then identify with a religion to justify them.

I thought the body horror part was effective. I will have to think through and discuss how the monster/body horror theme relates to the trans experience.

The story of Revelation is a highly symbolic liberatory narrative about a minority religious group surviving under imperial occupation. Some modern Christians, primarily in America, misread it as a triumphalist story about God proving them right and torturing their enemies. There's a good novel in there about how we misperceive monsters in the same way, but I don't think this novel gets there. The thing I look for in a work about cults in some understanding off why people joined the cult.

I will have to think through how the body horror part relates to the trans experience.

A religious cult unleashed a pandemic known as The Flood on the world, killing nearly the entire population of the world. The cult continues to hunt down the few survivors in the name of god with flood-infected creatures called Graces.

Two years later: Benji, a 16-year-old trans boy, flees the cult after they murder his father and finds refuge in a group that is the remains of the local LGBTQ+ centre and begins to fall for Nick who leads the group. But Benji harbours a secret, he has been infected with a form of the flood that will slowly destroy him but give him the ability to control the Graces and turn them against the cult, or wipe out the few remnants of humanity.

This has been on my list for soooooo long! It is a dystopian YA novel with a lot of body horror, religious abuse, transphobia and violence but it still manages to feel hopeful and sweet in its romance. While triggering in parts its path of revenge against the cult feels cathartic (especially in the context of growing Christian nationalism). I enjoyed it a great deal but it is not an easy read.

Hell Followed With Us is an amazing book.

As a queer person who grew up in a cult and got to deal with all the shit that came along with that, Hell Followed With Us is like a breath of fresh (or rotten) air; I grew up in hell on earth and this felt like an acknowledgment of all the shit I went through. A nod of solidarity between two suffering souls, a hopeful gaze to the other in the fire. The first chapter brought up memories for me, of freedom, of death, of uncertainty. I've had writing speak to me before, but this is an affirmation of my hellish life, an ode to queer people suffering under the weight of religion everywhere! This book falls into the category of the shit I'm into perfectly: Religion and queer things! The chapters seemed a bit fast-paced, but well-done with rapport throughout. The characters were well fleshed out, the mental imagery this book conjured was just beautiful! (Yes, I know, I have a very strange definition of beauty.) All in all, I look forward to seeing more from this author!