Quiet, faith-soaked folk horror where everything eventually comes home to roost.
Some horror shouts. Roost by Hope Madden whispers, and that is so much worse. This literary folk horror novella drops you into a dying Ohio town where twin sisters Joy and Hope are born on Easter Sunday, in the same minute the local witch falls dead beneath a winged shadow. What follows is a slow-burn study of Catholic dread, small-town American gothic decay, and a coming-of-age marked by something patient and watchful.
Madden writes like a filmmaker who refuses to blink, building dread out of shag carpet and cellar shadow until the shape in the corner turns suddenly, terribly clear. A faith-soaked study of two sisters and the thing that waits for them, controlled and certain from its very first page.
Roost by Hope Madden | Lacandon Jungle Press | 2026 |
The exercise machine in the Sehrigs’ cellar is the kind you half-remember from an old sitcom, a wide belt strapped to a stand, built to shake the fat off whoever climbs aboard. On her sixth birthday, Hope Murphy ends up pinned to it by her own hair while a shadow with wings climbs the wall behind her. Her twin sister waves at it.
Roost moves at the pace of a slow exhale. Hope Madden builds her dread out of ordinary things: shag carpet, returnable pop bottles, a metal ice cream cone outside a drive-up stand with its swirl top blown off in a winter storm. Nothing screams. The fear seeps in sideways, through detail, through whatever the prose chooses to linger on a beat too long.
The setup is simple and very good. Easter Sunday, rural Ohio, 1970. The town witch steps onto her porch at sunset, looks to the sky, and something wide and winged passes over her lawn. She drops dead in the grass. In that same minute, six blocks away, twins Joy and Hope Murphy are born. An Easter miracle, the family calls it. The neighbours are less sure.
From there the book skips forward in roughly six-year jumps, landing only on the years the girls’ birthday falls again on Easter. Four visits. Four holy weeks. And each time, somewhere in the small town of Edenton, young people turn up dead.
The book takes place in spring, in the run-up to Easter, all that talk of resurrection and the Lord’s return. Spring is supposed to mean rebirth. Madden flips that. Every birthday in this book arrives wrapped in death, and the warm light only makes the shadow longer. By the third visit, I started to dread the smell of lilac on the page, which is a strange thing to be able to say about a book, and a real compliment to the writer.
Madden writes the whole thing in present tense, third person, and it’s the right call. Present tense drops you into the room as it happens, with none of the comfort that comes from knowing someone lived to tell it later. It reads like a film that is still rolling. That makes sense, because Madden directs films when she isn’t writing them, and you can feel the trained eye in every scene she sets up.
The structure earns its bird metaphor. The four parts run Hatchlings, Nestlings, Chicks, Fledgling, following the twins from the egg toward the edge of the nest. It’s a clever frame, because a roost is a place you come back to, and the thing in this book keeps coming home.
The kids sound like kids. They bicker about whose birthday is worse, pocket Barbie clothes off a neighbour’s carpet, trade playground theology about who is and isn’t a sinner. A sing-song chant about a secret place and a chickadee threads through the years, the way a nursery rhyme curdles when you catch it in the wrong room.
Madden trusts white space too. She will end a scene on a flat, plain image and let the silence after it do the screaming.
Roost is a book about faith, and about the particular weather of growing up Catholic in a town that is already dying. The Murphy girls move through the sacraments like checkpoints: baptism, communion, confession, and confirmation. Their mother cannot breathe easy until she has put April behind her, all that waiting for the Lord’s return filling her with a low, constant fear. Madden catches something true about that strain of belief, the way it braids love and dread so tightly you can’t pull them apart.
The town carries as much weight as the church. Edenton is a place people leave. More cars drive out than stay. The ice cream stand on the good side of the highway gets the owner’s attention; the one in the failing neighbourhood gets the leftovers and the teenage staff. Madden plants her horror in that slow economic bleed, in the feel of a community quietly emptying while something patient waits for whatever is left.
Then there are the twins. Doubling is old horror furniture, but Madden uses it with intent. Joy and Hope are not interchangeable. One of them seems to know the shadow. One of them does not want to. The book is fascinated by the gap between being chosen and choosing, by what it means to be marked by something before you are old enough to consent to it.
That reads, to me, like a story about grooming dressed in folk-horror clothes, about an outside force working patiently on a child while every adult looks the other way. I won’t spoil where it goes. I’ll only say it goes somewhere that left me sitting in a long, unhappy quiet after the last page.
There is Wizard of Oz seasoning here too, deliberate and a little wicked. Someone has scrawled “Surrender Dorothy” on the dead woman’s steps. The winged shape recalls the witch’s flying monkeys. Madden takes the most American of children’s fairy tales and lets something far older roost inside it.
This is where Madden started. Roost was her debut novella, first out in 2022, and Lacandon Jungle Press has now brought it back in a 2026 edition with new cover art by Claire L. Smith. Coming to it this way is an odd pleasure, because the whole writer is already present on page one.
Madden has spent more than a decade as a film critic, co-hosting the Fright Club podcast and running reviews out of Columbus, Ohio. She knows horror from the inside, every beat and trope and cheat. Her second novella, Killer Pictures, leaned hard into that knowledge, a meta-horror set at a film festival where movies start killing the people whose names they carry. Her first feature as writer-director, Obstacle Corpse, put her behind the camera for real.
Roost shows that cinematic instinct in its rawest, most restrained form, before the genre-savvy wink of the later work. If Killer Pictures is Madden grinning at the audience, Roost is Madden refusing to blink. The control is already total. The patience is already there. What this reissue confirms is that the quiet, dread-soaked register was hers from the very start.
The supernatural element plays like a sly reworking of the immortal-predator story; the figure at the centre seduces, recruits, and proves very hard to kill, which puts a fresh and mean spin on a creature most of us think we have seen every version of.
For comparable books, not films, I kept circling back to Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, for the way two sisters and one watchful small town can brew more menace than any monster. Paul Tremblay’s A Head Full of Ghosts shares the Catholic pressure-cooker and the family strain.
Where Madden parts company with the pack is restraint. Roost keeps its worst moments at the edge of the frame and lets your own head fill the rest, which is harder to pull off and far harder to shake. It points toward a strain of horror that is gaining ground right now, quiet, character-deep, more interested in dread than in damage.
Madden spends the whole book teaching you to watch the corners, and by the end, you understand the title is a promise, not an image. Everything comes home eventually.
Roost by Hope Madden
Roost is a literary horror novella from award-winning writer and filmmaker Hope Madden, director of Obstacle Corpse.
Born beneath strange circumstances on Easter Sunday, twin sisters Hope and Joy Murphy grow up in a quiet religious neighborhood shadowed by whispers, disappearances, recurring visions, and the growing sense that something has been watching them for years.
As faith gives way to suspicion and childhood gives way to fear, Hope begins to realize that whatever marked their family from the beginning may still be waiting nearby.
Blending psychological tension with supernatural horror, Roost is an atmospheric descent into faith, dread, memory, and the quiet ways fear makes itself at home in ordinary lives.
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