I didn’t have a particularly good time, and I realized just how much of my reading time is while I’m eating. It’s a graphic horror novel with lots of religious trauma, body horror, and vomiting. I thought this was going to be a fantasy novel. Religious trauma, body mutilation and other body horror, abuse, suicide, violence, depression, sex shaming, vomiting, homophobia, and transphobia all play major roles in this book and are definitely not shied away from. These survivors, teens from an LGBTQ+ community center, are one of the last groups still fighting against the Angels and with them Benji hopes to find a way to be good despite the horror he is becoming. Benji has doubts, so he runs away and falls in with a group of survivors. Hell Followed With Us follows Benji, a trans boy who grew up in a fanatic religious cult called the Angels that has committed a mass genocide of nonbelievers and which has injected him with something that will eventually turn him into a monster that is meant to bring about a doomsday.

In any case, I grabbed it and read it and even though I can say that it is a good book, I probably wouldn’t have read it if I’d taken a little more time to figure out what it was before I committed to it. It was only tentatively on my TBR, but then I found it at the library and figured I may as well grab it: how often is a very popular, relatively new book just sitting on the shelf at the library? In my experience, not often. It’s been very popular, it has a cool cover, and I’m always interested in LGBTQ+ fantasy. I read Hell Followed With Us by Andrew Joseph White even though I sort of knew it wasn’t going to be for me.

Hell followed with