I really came to care about Benji as a character, as well as Nick (Benji’s love interest and leader of the survivors at Acheson). White excels at the gory descriptions found within these pages, and the action sequences are all extremely well-written. It’s bleak, and Benji’s journey is an often painful one to read about. HFWU can be a difficult book to read at times. It’s so different than anything else on the YA market today, from the post-apocalyptic concept to the trans main character and wonderful autism rep. However, the Flood and Seraph are killing him one day at a time, and it’s up to Benji and his new friends to figure out how to survive in a world that wants them dead.
Until he decides he doesn’t want to be the cult’s destructive savior. Benji, infected with a special strain of Flood that will turn him into a monster called Seraph, is expected to bring about a new world order. Non-believers, those who don’t adhere to the cult’s extremist views on religion, are promptly killed, while the stragglers are left to a militia group called The Angels. The world is no longer what we thought it was–a planet decimated by climate change and a disease called the Flood, and it is run by a group of terrorists who believe that the only way to save the world is to cleanse it, aka commit genocide. After the horrific murder of his father, Benji is taken in by a group of teenagers who have managed to survive the apocalypse by taking shelter in what was once the Acheson LGBTQ+ Center in Pennsylvania. HFWU follows sixteen year old Benji, a trans boy on the run from the extremist cult who raised him.
Throw in some body horror and trans-masculine rep and you’ve got yourself one hell (pun intended) of a story. A brutal, gory gem of a book, HFWU is what happens when eco-fascists get combined with far-right evangelicalism.
I’ve found my favorite book of the year, and it’s Hell Followed With Us by Andrew Joseph White. HELL FOLLOWED WITH US by ANDREW JOSEPH WHITE
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