Andrew Joseph White’s science fiction novel Hell Followed With Us spares no opportunity to bring in the body horror. After a book of trans protagonist Benji vomiting his organs from a bioweapon, his conflicted fiancé Theo almost retches on prayer: “the words come out rotten; less words and more stomach acid or whatever terrible thing is forcing itself up this time. It’s taken root in his organs, festering with maggots and eating him alive. No matter how hard he pulls, he just can’t get the sick parts out” (295). The metaphor of words “come out rotten” from their “root” in Theo’s queasy organs, despite his best efforts, gestures to the religious shame at the core of White’s dystopian young adult story. In this horror narrative, White asks what our trauma makes us.

Hell begins with sixteen-year-old Benji fleeing his mother’s globe-depopulating cult, the Angels, in the fictitious city of Acheson, Pennsylvania subsequent to climate catastrophe and a devastating Angel-induced pandemic. When he chances upon the teen survival group of the Acheson LGBTQ+ Center (ALC) and their reclusive leader, Nick, Benji does his best to contribute in the struggle for survival against a murderous cult and an uncaring environment. But the Angels infected Benji with a new virus that rots his brain and body, and while it gives him the power to communicate with those zombified by the last Angel virus, both the ALC and the Angels only have certain uses for a living bomb.

As a teen, White’s exploration of religious trauma, queer kinship, and autistic personhood stippled through science fiction and horror would’ve blown my mind; as an adult, I’m still struck by his facility with exploring themes through genre. While Benji’s first-person narration spirals intro remembrances of transphobia and abuse by Angels, conversations with ALC members from a variety of belief systems suggest generative possibilities in faith. Likewise, the ALC’s flaws show squabbling among queer youth as well as reconciliation and celebration of difference. Nick’s autism gives him the joy of stimming as well as the agony of sensory overload (both briefly discussed in this Autistic Self-Advocacy Network resource). On a structural level, too, White uses science fiction to exaggerate aspects of the real world ancillary to these themes. Masking to mitigate particle exposure from fires and the infected calls back to the climate collapse-induced wildfires and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. More directly, the relentless body-and-mind overhaul of Benji’s Seraph infection—”first you start puking up your organs, and then you get pissed”—calls to mind the systemic travails of puberty (82). Meditative crises of faith, peer acceptance and rejection, and the cruel vagaries of unwelcome bodily developments are all here in their adolescent infamy.

Unfortunately, the cast of Hell Followed With Us spreads these ideas thin; outside of Benji, Nick, and Theo, the novel’s many characters often threaten to blur into iterations of the same couple archetypes. However, as a debut novel stitching together teenage struggle with thought-provoking horror, White blazes a trail he’s only deepened with gritty and urgent narratives like his recent Compound Fracture. Questioning faith, making friends, and discovering oneself in ongoing collapse can be hell, but following with them in science fiction is not.