Andrew Joseph White on Hell Followed with Us: Young Adult Horror

Andrew Joseph White is a queer, trans author from Virginia, where he grew up falling in love with monsters and wishing he could be one, too. He writes about trans kids with claws and fangs, and what happens when they bite back. In Hell Followed with Us (Peachtree Teen), his debut novel, 16-year-old trans boy Benji is on the run from the cult that raised him, a fundamentalist sect that unleashed Armageddon and decimated the world’s population. Benji desperately searches for a place where the cult can’t get its hands on him or, more importantly, the bioweapon they infected him with. He’s rescued by a group of teens from the local Acheson LGBTQ+ Center, known as the ALC, but its leader, Nick, knows Benji’s darkest secret: The cult’s bioweapon mutates him into a monster deadly enough to wipe humanity from the Earth. Still, Nick offers Benji shelter among his ragtag group of queer teens, as long as Benji can control the monster and use its power to defend them. Benji accepts those terms – until he discovers the ALC’s mysterious leader has a hidden agenda and more than a few secrets of his own.

Lee Mandelo is a writer, critic, and occasional editor whose fields of interest include speculative and queer fiction, especially when the two coincide. Their debut novel Summer Sons (Tordotcom) is a sweltering, queer Southern Gothic, and their work has appeared on Tor.com and in Uncanny Magazine, Clarkesworld, and Nightmare. Mandelo will be at Miami Book Fair 2022 to moderate a conversation with Andrew Joseph White, the queer, trans author of the novel Hell Followed with Us (Peachtree Teen).