The story opens with adolescent Isaac at a Christian summer camp, a summer marked with accountability partners, proclamations of abstinence, and fun with Supersoakers, all as he’s worrying he’s a “degenerate committing sins foul enough to get me flicked like a loathsome spider into endless agony.” Kirk captures this milieu with wit and some warmth, despite his frank accounting of the toll on Isaac’s psyche. When Isaac enters a public high school, he suddenly is playing a dangerous game of balancing his evangelical Christianity with his desire to fit in. As Isaac grieves the loss of his father, he begins to question what he has always known: “What if we’re allowed to say what if?” he asks a friend.
“My prefabricated mind had never been mine,” Isaac notes, as the convictions he was raised to embrace (belief in Hell, the Rapture, that “being gay is bad” and that “science is fake”) fall away. Kirk concludes with a tear-inducing conversation between Isaac and his mother, in which she tells him that they’re never going to agree on everything but that “I’d choose Hell over a world where I’m not your mama.” Kirk’s depiction of evangelical life is convincing, sometimes pointed, but also humane and never caricatured. The result is a resonant novel, briskly told, with laugh-out-loud comedy and poignant insight.
Takeaway: Frank, funny account of an 2000s evangelical upbringing.
Comparable Titles: Kelsey McKinney’s God Spare the Girls, Julia Scheeres’s Jesus Land.
Production grades
Cover: A-
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: A
A gentle, sweet, and wry story about grappling with the unravelling of a kind of self and the finding of another that will be familiar to so many of us. A wonderful time capsule of a moment in culture and a crisis of faith that rings with uncommon truth and is shot through with surprising humor and kindness. I loved this book.
Jason Kirk's novel perfectly embodies what it was like to grow up in American Evangelical culture — from purity culture to Satanic panic to the Christian Nationalism sprinkled throughout. Relatable af. There were several moments throughout this book that I felt like I was reading my own teenage Evangelical diary. Kirk gives us a hilarious way to remember the cringe of our past while feeling grateful for the people who helped us leave the harmful parts of our faith behind.
This book will remind you what it was like to be — or be classmates with — the religious kids at school. At turns cathartic and cringe, Kirks' book drops you into the mind of a hormonal and confused youth group kid — facing all the horror, humiliation, and humor of high school with the added burden of "saving souls.
Divinely savage, emotionally pure, and devilishly funny, HELL IS A WORLD WITHOUT YOU insightfully captures the treacherous and often hilarious world of a questioning Evangelical high school student and his eclectic group of misfit friends. Kirk took me back to my days as a hopelessly confused church kid trying to save myself and my friends from eternal damnation while simultaneously using biblical loopholes and contradictions to justify, rationalize, and make sense of the world around me. HELL IS A WORLD WITHOUT YOU masterfully peels away the veneer of innocence and ultimately exposes the vulnerability that connects us as human beings. It’s a sweetly subversive romp through faith, doubt, and the search for identity and meaning that I won’t soon forget. I absolutely adored this book with every fiber of my being.
I grew up in one of the most Evangelical places on the planet. Jason Kirk’s hilarious, big-hearted, and deeply humane novel transported me right back into life as a teenager in that world, with its heady mix of wide-eyed absurdity, Machiavellian cunning, sincere kindness, and tragic yearning. This is a world in which transcendent spiritual crises can be faced down at Pizza Hut, and the miracle of HELL IS A WORLD WITHOUT YOU is that it sees both sides of that equation with equal clarity and tenderness. It’s funny, absolutely, but it’s the kind of funny that comes from recognizing that the search for meaning is no joke.
HELL IS A WORLD WITHOUT YOU is a magic trick: a portrait of a time and place that feels almost tactile in its specificity, yet also utterly universal in a way that will ring true to anyone who's had the exciting, terrifying experience of growing up. Jason Kirk brings it all to life with warmth and humor, giving Isaac Siena a chosen family you'll be thinking about for a long time.
Normally, 'funny' novels are either ones written for middle schoolers or for overly literate snobs who confuse their own smugness with having a sense of humor. But Jason Kirk has written a genuinely funny novel, with real laughs to be found in both its characters and in its painfully accurate depiction of growing up in a pious world that you're not entirely certain you believe in. It's a deeply funny book, which is the best kind of book.
In between artfully woven portraits of turn-of-the-millennium adolescence — and they are numerous — Jason has constructed something extraordinary: a compelling case for the existence of a better world. This book is for anyone who hopes or even believes that world might someday be real, and that someday might already be here.
No book I've read has better or more lovingly depicted the experiences of youth group, teen Evangelical terror, and growing up in the world of nondenominational Christianity in the early 2000s. I loved it, even when it made me remember times I wish I could forget.
Kirk’s story of the modern American Evangelical experience is unsparingly honest, at points almost astonishingly accurate, and at different points comical, endearing, and purely hideous. Most importantly, it stands firmly apart from both the dismissive condescension of outsiders and the understandably bitter attitudes of many who’ve left that life. Instead, it is unlike anything I’ve read about the Evangelical church: unshakably critical, yet just as unshakably empathetic, toward both those caught in the fundamentally bewildering crisis of false spirituality and those perpetuating it. After all, as narrator Isaac chronicles, they’re one and the same. HELL IS A WORLD WITHOUT YOU beautifully accounts for a wealth of structures and systems that have long needed that accounting, but above all, it offers the human beings in this story the unconditional love they aren’t quite able to afford themselves.
Leaving the faith in which you grew up can be lonely. So even though Jason Kirk tells the story in a novel, it seems at times as if he wrote the biography of many of us. Sometimes this book will leave you laughing, and other times it will leave you crying, but at all times it will leave you feeling a little less alone.
In a moment when streaming docuseries keep trying to render the full power, trauma, and emotion of turn-of-the-century American Evangelicalism, Jason Kirk’s HELL IS A WORLD WITHOUT YOU stands out for its humor, compassion, heart, and attention to the telling details. It is the rare book that engaged me as both a former pastor’s kid and a current scholar of religion. If religion is a way people sort out “us” and “them,” then Kirk draws a masterful portrait of young people figuring out who “we” really are. And they figure it out through an alchemy that turns shame into love. It’s a message vital to our current moment and one that readers will find immediately relatable through Kirk’s precisely and deeply rendered characters. Jesus & John Wayne meets The Goonies, this book will make you laugh, make you cry, make you think, and might even make you listen to MxPx, whether you’ve been to youth group or not.
HELL IS A WORLD WITHOUT YOU, as funny as it is unpredictable, isn’t just about the modern American Christian experience. It’s for anyone who’s ever felt disappointed by an institution they thought was supposed to love them, who’s struggled to reconcile inherited ethics with nuanced realities, and who remembers the noisy mix of joy, guilt, freedom, and anxiety that comes with being a teenager. (And anyone who experienced formative moments via AOL Instant Messenger.)
As a non-Evangelical, I had no idea this world existed, much less what it’s like on the inside. It’s an entirely different and sometimes terrifying galaxy, and Jason writes his ass off about it: beautifully, angrily, and with deep empathy for people stranded on Planet Jesus.
Isaac Siena’s brain is full: normal teenage angst, memorized Bible verses, lustful thoughts, a thundering voice telling him to purge those lustful thoughts, a bottomless catalog of Christian rock, and a dead father who everyone believes is burning in Hell. As Jason Kirk juggles all those voices and dozens more, HELL IS A WORLD WITHOUT YOU is so quick and funny and smart, you almost forget he's trying to square the unsquarable contradictions of hardcore Christianity along the way.
I’d never before read a book so in tune with what it’s like to grow up in an Evangelical church. The details here? Kirk splits arrows — always on point, exact. He knows this world backward and forward: See You at the Pole, I Kissed Dating Goodbye, ZOEgirl, DC Talk, Underoath, Left Behind, self-hatred, doubt, fear of your body, fear for your soul, and trying to impress your date by recommending a Christian replacement for Sublime. HELL IS A WORLD WITHOUT YOU is deeply funny and deeply felt. A heater. The good, good shit.
Devastatingly funny, heartbreaking, and incisive. Richly drawing a cast of characters who navigate a world of imposed shame they never asked to be a part of, HELL IS A WORLD WITHOUT YOU deftly brings us into Isaac's world, one that will resonate with readers regardless of background. I love every single one of these idiot church kids, and so will you.
Jason Kirk’s HELL IS A WORLD WITHOUT YOU is funny, but it’s also compassionate, romantic, and optimistic, all without making a big fuss about it. It exemplifies what should be the most Christian of all attributes: It’s open-hearted and curious about the world, giving space for everyone’s place in it. It rings with the specificity of the personal while evoking the universal. Whoever you are, you’ll find some of yourself in it.
HELL IS A WORLD WITHOUT YOU is an enthralling coming-of-age story, equally as engaging as it is hilarious. It is a sweet yet biting portrait of a journey of finding oneself and learning about intimacy through — and then against — the structure of extreme religiosity. A refreshing debut novel from a unique and imaginative writer.
