CHILDHOOD FEARS: HOPE MADDEN COMES HOME TO ROOST

14/9/2022

There’s a 1971 horror film called The Brotherhood of Satan that I watched on TV once, years ago. It’s campy, Satanist fun, but it really got to me. Not the Satanism, not the “child in peril” trope, not even the inventive climax that was kind of a precursor to Being John Malkovich.

A family keeps trying to drive out of a small, rural town and no matter what they do, they can’t leave.

I’ve seen a similar type of thing in many films since, but this was the first time. Even though the film’s larger metaphor is not that your hometown is inescapable, that’s the terror it touched in me. It all looked eerily familiar.

For many years—probably since I left my own hometown—I dream that I’m back in Tiffin, Ohio. No matter what direction I walk or drive, no matter what my plans are or how determined I am, something keeps me from ever leaving..

Usually, I find myself walking down the “grass alley” —a path where a series of back yards meet, leading from my back yard to a big willow tree by another alley. Tiffin is lousy with alleys. And by the time I get to the willow, I get turned around and every alley seems to lead to the wrong place. I take one, realize it’s the wrong one or go the wrong direction.

Or I take an alley then remember my car is at someone else’s house and I can’t remember how to get there. Or my ride stayed back at my house, and I’ve been gone so long they’ve probably left by now.

That specific anxiety is common enough for a coming-of-age tale like mine. In Roost, twin girls face mounting danger as they approach their 18th birthday. What will they do next and will they do it together are questions that hang in the air. But more importantly to the sisters is whether the town itself will let them go.

My own anxiety, the one that still visits me as I sleep, had less to do with the fear of what was out there in the unknown future. My fear was my hometown itself. That’s the anxiety I think seeps through onto the page: the isolation, the push toward conformity, the fucking cornfields that surround the town like a prison wall.

And though now, a lifetime and many miles from my hometown, I can see it as a charming example of rural Ohio, that same dread still wakes me up at night.

Roost is available in print, e-book and audio book format from Off Limits Press.

Roost
by Hope Madden

Every spring in small town Ohio, kids get a touch more daylight, wander a little farther from the front porch, and spend a bit more time off on their own, exploring.

One such spring, the Murphy twins were considered an Easter miracle. And now, almost 18 years later - Easter week, 1988 - the girls approach their birthday, and busybodies around town get a little anxious. Every time their birthday falls on Easter Sunday, bad things seem to happen, and the neighbors have noticed.

A babysitter goes missing. The little girl up the road meets a bad end. Maybe it's coincidence. Maybe living in a town dropped smack in the middle of farmland - with miles of corn in every direction - makes people feel isolated from the outside. Folks start to see evil where it isn't.

Or maybe this year, the devil's come home to roost.

Hope Madden

Hope Madden is a writer and award-winning filmmaker living with her husband George and cat Velma in Columbus, Ohio. She writes what scares her, which worked out fine until she became a filmmaker and had to live what scared her for the duration of a shoot. Terrible decision. Her novella, Roost, was published in 2022 by Off Limits Press and her first feature film releases in late 2022.