Best-selling Texas Author Turns Gothic Horror In New Novel

For about 150 pages, The Chambermaids is a gentle book. Our protagonist, Elouise, is a gentle woman making the best of rough times as she and her destitute husband move to an inherited estate in East Texas. The unease, there, is gentle, too. While having mysteriously stocked larders and almost total isolation is unsettling, it’s hardly scary. Even when the titular chambermaids appear suddenly, their menace is gentle and delivered with much-needed domestic aid.

Then things get freaking metal.

This is hardly surprising if you know anything about the author, Richmond’s Leigh M. Hall. Since 2020, she’s independently published 15 psychological thrillers in just five years, winning awards and drawing in audiences with her gift for compelling mental anguish. Many of her previous books center on gaslighting and manipulation, but The Chambermaids is her first foray into outright horror.

“It’s not mind games, this time,” said Hall in a phone interview. “This time, there’s really something there, something supernatural is out to get her.”

Elouise isn’t typical of Hall’s other female protagonists, most of whom have a great deal of personal power and agency. Instead, Elouise is a classic gothic heroine, trapped in society’s expectations of women to be passive and at the mercy of men’s mistakes. Part of the horror comes from her lack of options. Even though the house she and her husband, Wilbur, move to is in her name alone, she feels she must prop up his pretention of success and deteriorating alcoholism.

Hall heightens the unreality of her novel by being deliberately vague in the setting, almost as if it was a fairy tale rather than a period piece. The reader never learns exactly what year or where the dreaded house is located, only that it is in East Texas around the time cities began installing electric lights. None of that modernity reaches the house, though. Elouise might as well be trapped in a medieval castle on the Texas plains.

There’s even a fairytale-like saga that inspired The Chambermaids. Hall drew on the story of Christine and Léa Papin, two sisters in domestic service that were convicted of murdering their employer and her daughter in 1933 France. The case captivated Hall, who was inspired to create her own devilish pair of maid sisters.

“They were very odd,” said Hall. “There was a lot of stories that floated around about these sisters, about how close they were. People kind of assumed they were romantic with each other. One of them didn’t talk very much. I heard this story a long time ago, but when I decided that I wanted to write a southern gothic horror, I thought about the Papin Sisters.” 

It’s impossible to describe the last third of the book in detail without spoiling things, but once the mask comes off the sisters, the novel truly earns its horror laurels. There is something almost Lovecraftian when the Texas landscape twists to match the demonic influence of the chambermaids. They themselves are monsters straight out of nightmares.

It would be fair to call The Chambermaids a folk horror tale in the same vein as Robert Eggers’s The VVitch or Ari Aster’s Midsommar. The sisters serve dark forces that Elousie finds grotesque and abhorrent, but her terror is tinged with envy. She hates the chambermaids as much for the control they exert over the house, something Elouise herself in her proto-tradwife mindset can’t seem to find the strength to do. As with all good folk horror, it’s the rewards of blasphemy that unsettle the most. 

“I was watching a lot of stuff set [in the] 18th, 19th century,” said Hall. “I watched The VVitch, and that inspired a lot of the setting details. I wanted them isolated in an area where nobody’s going to reach them, nobody’s going to bother them, nobody’s going to see what’s going on.”

It’s a stunning horror debut from a Texas author and seamlessly makes the transition from thrillers grounded in reality to stories that involve the supernatural. Hall says she plans to continue writing in the horror genre, and The Chambermaids is an excellent argument for why she should.

The Chambermaids is available November 11, 2025, from LMH Publications.