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Hell Followed With Us

Andrew Joseph White

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Aug 20, 2022 Lindsay rated it it was amazing

Shelves: lgbtqia, horror

As a young trans person, Benji is well aware that his mother doesn't want him growing up as boy. She'd much prefer that he would identify as a girl under her control ... and turn into a terrifying monstrous instrument of the apocalypse. One of those things is about to happen whether Benji like it or not.

The world was destroyed two years ago when Christian cultists calling themselves Angels let loose a plague that horrifically mutates and kills nearly everyone it infects. The Angels have spent th As a young trans person, Benji is well aware that his mother doesn't want him growing up as boy. She'd much prefer that he would identify as a girl under her control ... and turn into a terrifying monstrous instrument of the apocalypse. One of those things is about to happen whether Benji like it or not.

The world was destroyed two years ago when Christian cultists calling themselves Angels let loose a plague that horrifically mutates and kills nearly everyone it infects. The Angels have spent the last two years hunting down and brutally ritualistically killing the survivors. Their belief is that humanity has defiled the Earth and must die. Benji was raised in the cult, but on realizing he was trans his father made a desperate attempt to get him free of them. And although the people Benji falls in with, a group of people sheltering at a LGBTIQ+ youth center, accept Benji as trans, some of them may also see him as a tool.

This book is full of visceral body horror. The cult uses "Graces", hideously mutated "survivors" of the Flood virus, who would fit well into a John Carpenter horror movie. Benji himself is slowly mutating into a "Seraph", a One Ring of Graces, where he can control anything affected by the virus. Benji has seen the failed experiments that tried to create a Seraph: he knows what he's turning into. As he says, it's hard to complain about people seeing him and thinking "girl", when fairly soon they'll see him and think "monster".

Balanced against Benji's transformation is Nick, an autistic gay boy who is one of the leaders of the group sheltering in the Acheson LGBTQ+ Center, and who seems interested in Benji but has much to hide himself. There's also Benji's betrothed from the Angels, a former Angel death cultist and now broken man who accepts Benji as a boy, but has an abusive history with him. Benji needs to work out who, if anyone, he can trust.

Body horror and terrifying transformations while on the run from Christian cultists who would prefer people dead rather than alive seems like a pretty reasonable allegory for life as a trans person. The author is clearly injecting a lot of his own feelings into Benji's lived experience, and they're not to be envied. One would hope that this is exaggerated to match the horrific nature of the world that he's created, but I worry that some of them are not.

A brilliant imagining of the trans experience as horror that I recommend to anyone with a strong stomach.

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