I’m a lifelong sci‑fi and dystopia devotee, and every so often a book lands that feels both mythic and modern, as if someone dragged a medieval morality play through a post‑apocalyptic wasteland and lit it on fire. Andrew Joseph White’s Hell Followed with Us (released 7 June 2022) is precisely that: a dark epic of faith, flesh, and found family that refuses to blink.
Hell Followed with Us — Andrew Joseph White’s dark epic
If you’ve ever craved a story that marries the operatic stakes of epic fantasy with the immediacy of YA horror, this is the one. Hell Followed with Us follows a young trans protagonist fighting to survive a fanatical order and a world chewed up by plague and prophecy. Though set in the ruin of a near future, the moral architecture feels fiercely medieval: heresies, inquisitions, angels recast as abominations, and a stark struggle against powers that insist suffering is salvation. It’s the kind of narrative that swings a scythe—wide, unflinching, and grimly beautiful.
White’s prose is visceral in the truest sense: a sensory onslaught of rot and radiance, prayer and pus. Yet beneath the gore lies a beating heart—community, self‑recognition, and the ferocious tenderness of people who choose one another when institutions have failed them. The book balances intimate character work with sweeping, almost liturgical cadence, so that personal choices reverberate like bells across a ravaged landscape. The effect is properly epic: not just big battles, but big feelings, big questions, big costs.
As a lover of dystopia, I was struck by how deftly the novel refracts ancient anxieties—sin, purity, sacrifice—through the cracked lens of modern collapse. It channels the mood of a beleaguered medieval city under siege, only the siege is doctrinal as much as physical. Dark forces abound, but they are human before they are monstrous, and that, I think, is the book’s most chilling—and honest—insight. It’s brutal, yes. It’s also bracingly humane.
Hell Followed with Us — Andrew Joseph White; quote + 🍵🍵🍵🍵
A line that haunts the title—and the book’s atmosphere—comes from the old apocalyptic wellspring: “And his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.” It’s Revelation, not the novel’s own phrasing, but the resonance is deliberate: the story moves with that same rider’s inevitability, the sense that judgement rides fast and mercy must be forged by hand. White wields that tone without pastiche, turning scripture’s thunder into a deeply personal storm.
My verdict: 🍵🍵🍵🍵. Four teacups for audacity, craft, and emotional clarity. The pacing is relentless without sacrificing nuance; the body horror is purposeful rather than gratuitous; and the found‑family thread offers warmth without sanding down the edges. I held one teacup back only because the intensity may overwhelm readers who prefer their dystopias less sanguine. For me, though, the sting is the point—and the balm is real.
If your shelves hold medieval epics beside post‑collapse nightmares, if you love stories that baptise you in dread and then resurrect you with defiance, this will absolutely sing for you. Imagine the dark liturgy of a plague‑era chronicle crossed with a queer, contemporary howl against institutional cruelty. It’s a 2022 release that already feels canonical in the conversation about what YA horror and dystopia can dare to do.
Hell Followed with Us is the rare book that feels older than time and painfully current all at once—a dark epic of faith tested, bodies remade, and communities chosen. It left me shaken, grateful, and oddly hopeful. Brew something strong, brace yourself, and ride.