Pixerina: A Haunting

by Joanne Anderton

Genres: Horror, Dark Fantasy

184 pages, Paperback

Published April 28, 2026

About the author

Joanne Anderton writes speculative fiction for anyone who likes their worlds a little different. Her publications include the novels Debris, Suited and Guardian, and the short story collection The Bone Chime Song and Other Stories. She has won the Australian Shadows Award, the Ditmar and multiple Aurealis awards. Her most recent book is the children's picture book, The Flying Optometrist.

Reviews

[Richard Quist · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pixerina: A Haunting by Joanne Anderton, published by Bad Hand Books is a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ riveting tale of an artist being possessed by, and possessing, her muse. Cruelty, neglect, indifference, obsession ... all woven together in this fascinating, gothic story where the present and past merge, and letting go doesn't necessarily mean moving on.

Rebecca Bell and her husband Aidan share their suburban home but as their creative talents take different forms from when they first met, they find themselves drifting apart. Rebecca, an artist, has struggled in recent years to find something that inspires and motivates her. Aidan has set his poetry aside for a career working in government communications. When Rebecca, over Aidan's objections, gives in to the temptation to finally explore a nearby abandoned house, she finds what she is looking for, and more. Will unraveling the mysteries of the past, and of the ghost of the girl who never was, provide her with the keys to her own future, or will she be lost in the search?

This intriguing tale of Rebecca's encounters with the strange house and what remains there is compelling and pulled me right in. It's a fantastic story of searching, discovery and loss ... and the price that both muse and artist must pay.

Thanks to Bad Hand for providing an eARC for my review!

[unstable.books · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pixerina: A Haunting is a quiet, unsettling novella set in the Australian suburbs that reads like a half-remembered dream. It casts a light on the cost of creating and what that demands or devours (or both). Rebecca's artistic paralysis feels painfully real, and her slow unraveling inside the house on the hill named "Pixerina" is rendered with creeping, intimate dread. The relationship between Rebecca and Angelica is where the story truly begins sharpening the edge. Something tender quickly curdles into something far more disturbing. Anderton smartly blurs the lines, asking who needs whom, and whether inspiration can ever be fully innocent. There's is also a strong undercurrent on expectation, ambition, relevance, and sacrifice. Rebecca's desperation to remain visible in a world eager to forget adds a biting realism alongside the supernatural elements. Angelica's story is particularly gut-wrenching. Atmospheric and whisperingly devastating, Pixerina trades jump scares for emotional unease, delivering a haunting that feels devastatingly real and all the more unnerving for it. Thank you Bad Hand Books for sending me an ARC for review. You can preorder this little beauty, that comes with a signed book plate, directly from Bad Hand's website. It drops April 28th, 2026 so don't miss it!

[Pan | Book Reviews and Recommendations · Rating 5 out of 5]

A hauntingly beautiful and quietly unsettling tale, Pixerina by Joanne Anderton feels like stepping into an illustrated dream where the edges blur between the living and the dead, the seen and the imagined.

It’s an urban gothic tale that doesn’t rely on loud scares; instead, it lingers like a ghost, through atmosphere, emotion, and the slow tightening of a mystery that refuses to let go.

This is a story where obsession becomes its own kind of haunting.

Rebecca Bell, an artist drawn to the decaying house on the hill, becomes consumed by its history and by Angelica, the little girl whose spirit still clings to the grounds.

Their relationship is the novel’s most compelling thread. Tender, unsettling, and full of tension. Angelica wants a friend; Rebecca wants a muse. Watching these desires intertwine and collide gives the story emotional weight beyond its supernatural premise.

The house itself is a character as the author pens it as moody, atmospheric, and steeped in secrets. Anderton’s writing captures that perfect gothic blend of beauty and rot, where every creaking floorboard hints at a deeper truth. The sense of place is so strong that you feel the pull Rebecca feels, even as you sense the danger beneath it.

Thomas Brown’s artwork elevates the novel into something special. The illustrations add texture to the haunting, making Angelica’s presence feel both intimate and uncanny. The visual layer makes Pixerina feel like a modern gothic artifact, something you want to hold and pore over.

A fresh take on the ghost story, Pixerina is a beautifully crafted, atmospheric haunting, perfect for readers who love their ghost stories with emotional depth, artistic flair, and a slow, satisfying unraveling of secrets. It’s a book that stays with you, not because it shouts, but because it whispers.

[Stacey ˗ ღ ˎˊ˗ · Rating 4 out of 5]

4⭐️
Rebecca and Aidan Bell were artists together, once upon a time. He was a poet, she was a visual artist, and they married and loved each other. Then something changed; Aidan “got a real job”, stopped writing, and Rebecca stopped making art. Until the day she decides to explore a gothic mansion at the end of her street that stands alone behind a crumbling wall, where she enters what feels like another dimension. Angelica - a young girl? A ghost? A fairie? - awaits her here. Whatever she is, she has been alone for a long time. And she wants Rebecca to help her.

Pixerina is a gothic horror novella set in Australia that explores themes of love, grief, separation, death, loss, creativity, art, and what history hides, told with a dual POV of Rebecca and Angelica. The house figures as a backdrop character that morphs throughout from muse to villain. Content warnings for domestic/interpersonal violence and child abuse/neglect.

Thank you to the author and Bad Hand Books for the early copy for review.

[SpinelessBookReviews · Rating 4 out of 5]

A haunting story in the truest essence where our main character isn't just haunted by their environment alone but themselves as well.

Rebecca Bell, a professional artist, and her husband Aiden live just up the road from a sprawling abandoned estate. Finally, unable to ignore it any longer, Bec breaks in in search of inspiration. What she finds amongst the rubble, not only ignites a flame in her creatively, but spirals into an all consuming obsession that she can't ignore.

One of the things that really struck me about this book was the enchanting prose that gave this whole book a whispy creeping quality. As more threats are revealed to Bec, her sanity and personal life, we watch Bec's the threads unravel as she chases her muse. Simultaneously laid on top of this are the glimpses of a dark past that left the estate permanently tainted.

Pixerna is a quick, very pretty, creeping haunted house story fueled by creative passion that is definitely worth checking out.

[Jade Black · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a great little read!

This is one skilled writer. Having such evocative settings and visuals without getting bogged down in description is tough. The ghostly elements and fire of an artist’s soul are visceral, and the contrast to the grounded marital tensions is excellent.

Beautifully written quiet horror, great characters, a core of artistry and ghosts, what more could I want?

(ARC review for Adventures Elsewhere Reviews)

[Daniela · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's something fascinating about a horror story where the source of the horror isn't what the ghost does to the human, but rather what the human does to the ghost.

Probably closer to a 3.5, but rounding up because it really nailed that ending in a way that made everything else come together for me.

[Stephanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This urban Gothic tale will leave you haunted.

[Horror Haus Books · Rating 2 out of 5]

One of my favorite elements of this book was the art exhibit framing at the beginning of each section. It immediately reminded me of Green Fuse Burning, and I thought it was such an atmospheric touch. It added a layer of depth and gave the story a slightly gallery-like feel that fit well with Rebecca’s character as an artist.

The premise itself is strong, an old house on a hill with a lingering child spirit desperate to be seen, and an artist who may be more interested in inspiration than friendship. The alternating perspectives between Rebecca and Angelica offered an interesting twist on the traditional haunted house story, especially with the emotional imbalance between what each of them believes is happening.

That said, while all the pieces were there, the execution didn’t fully come together for me. The pacing felt slow, and at times I found myself disengaged from the story. The shifting timelines and layered history had potential, but by the end, it didn’t quite mesh in a satisfying way.

Overall, Pixerina has a haunting concept and some beautifully atmospheric elements, but it didn’t completely land for me as a cohesive whole.


*I read an ARC so i’m really hoping this book went through at least one more round of edits before its publish date because there were more than a few grammar errors. So much so that some of the sentences here and there don’t even make sense.

[The Blog Without a Face · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Exhibition Opens in Two Weeks. The Bones Can Wait
BWAF RECOMMENDED READ
BWAF Score: 7/10

TL;DR: Pixerina and its artist share the same methods: take the child no one admits exists, the house that won’t stay still, the gap between inspiration and theft, and make something from it. Anderton’s dual narrative is controlled and strange where it needs to be. The domestic subplot outstays its welcome. The ending pulls one punch it shouldn’t. Read anyway.

The house is called Pixerina. It was named by someone who has been dead a long time. It sits at the top of a steep hill in a new suburb of Sydney, surrounded by chain-link and keep-out signs, and it has been calling to the woman who lives down the road for three years. She is an artist who has not made anything in three years. These facts are not unrelated.

Joanne Anderton‘s Pixerina: A Haunting is structured in five stages, named for phases of the creative process: Preparation, Incubation, Illumination, Creation. Each section opens with a gallery note, the flat interpretive prose of exhibition catalogs, for a painting by someone named Rebecca Bell. The paintings described are grim. A skeletal child on disturbed earth. A colonial house devoured by native flora. A woman’s face pushing through an abandoned wall, her skin the color of rotting wallpaper. The structure tells us, quietly, that we are looking at art from the future. The house is going to make her. The question the book holds throughout, in both hands, is what it will cost.

It runs two timelines. Rebecca (Bec) Bell is the artist: early thirties, marriage going cold, agent calling, career stalled. She breaks into the abandoned house and keeps going back. The other timeline is Angelica: a disabled child hidden in the upstairs rooms of the same house, decades earlier, confined by a father who is an artist (called only “Daddy”) and a mother (called only “Mother,” or “Lilith” when he speaks her name with his particular tenderness). Angelica draws faeries on the walls with stolen crayons. She names her doll Titania. She has never been outside the property. The man who fathered her does not like children and does not acknowledge her existence to anyone. He loves her in the way someone loves a thing they have made and do not know what to do with.

This is where the book is best. Anderton writes Angelica’s sections in something close to a children’s book voice, declarative and slightly simplified, and the horror lives entirely in the gap between the register and the content. Angelica catalogues the party guests she watches from her window with a child’s naming logic: Fatty, Snoozy, Nibbly, Clingy. She describes her father stealing her drawings with flat reverence. He makes them better, she thinks. They must be happier in his book. A sentence like that costs more than you expect it to, arriving in that register, from that mind.

The house does what it should do, which is to refuse ordinary space. Pixerina expands. Its corridors run longer than they should. Its rooms change positions. The backyard, which from the street looks like a large suburban block, contains a shed full of stone statues of the same woman over and over, a series of crumbling toadstool sculptures, a faerie circle Daddy built for the child he kept upstairs. Bec gets lost in it. Anderton describes this without explaining it, without separating the house’s strangeness from its natural dereliction, and the ambiguity is the atmosphere. Whether Pixerina is doing something to Bec or Bec is doing something to Pixerina is a question the book does not answer. It is right not to.

The gallery blurbs are the sharpest move in the book. By the time you reach the description of the final painting (a child weeping on disturbed earth, bones used as found materials in the canvas) you have read the scene from which the painting comes. The catalog note does not feel ironic. It feels like inevitability. This is what gets made from a ghost, from a grave, from a girl no one admitted existed. The blurbs are chilling in retrospect in a way they cannot be in the moment.

But the book has a pacing problem, and it lives in the marriage. Bec and Aidan’s unraveling occupies the middle sections in scenes that run longer than they need to, explaining what they could be suggesting. Aidan gave up poetry for a consultancy job and meets with ministers about bus payment systems and his parents are relieved he’s finally stable and Bec resents all of this, and all of it is stated rather than built. The dialogue in these scenes talks around what it means in the way that dialogue is supposed to talk around what it means, and then it also explains itself, which is one thing too many. (There is a version of their marriage that exists in atmosphere alone, in stubble on a jawline and a cold bowl of spaghetti bolognese on the bench, and that version surfaces occasionally. It is better than the version that talks about poetry.)

The local history museum, which arrives in Stage Three, is strange in the right way. The old man with his box of photographs, his refusal to say Lilith’s name without cracking, his insistence that there was no child, the fear coming off him when Bec presses. It is the only scene outside Pixerina’s walls that feels as alive as the house. It is also, structurally, too late. The information it delivers has been withheld past the point of maximum tension.

Anderton has been a presence in Australian speculative fiction for more than a decade, working across science fiction trilogies, short story collections, and horror. Her debut collection, The Bone Chime Song and Other Stories, took both the Aurealis and the Australian Shadows Awards for best collection, and her subsequent work has maintained an interest in what she calls “horror adds flavour to just about everything,” even when the container is genre fiction. Pixerina is a narrower, stranger book than anything in the Veiled Worlds trilogy: a 127-page novella from Bad Hand Books, published in the tradition of the small press horror object, with Thomas Brown interior illustrations and a cover that does not misrepresent the contents. She reveals in the acknowledgments that Angelica began as an obituary she read in The Economist, for a real woman named Angelica Garnett, daughter of Bloomsbury painter Vanessa Bell, who as a child haunted her mother’s Sussex house while the artists came and went. Garnett’s aunt Virginia Woolf gave her the nickname Pixerina. Duncan Grant, perhaps her real father, once drew her in her mother’s arms and rendered the child, in Anderton’s account, as a scribble and a nothing. You can feel this biographical seed through the whole novella. It is the right seed to plant. The question of what it costs a child to be born into art instead of care is one the book takes seriously, and does not resolve.

The catalog note for the final painting, in the exhibition that gets made from all of this, describes the girl on the canvas as weeping where a beloved pet was buried. Square Gallery will hang it on a dark wall with careful lighting. People will find it moving. The girl in the painting is not a pet. The catalog note does not say what she is.

[ScarlettAnomalyReads · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oh this was another new to me author I have now discovered thanks to Badhand Books, thank you!

This is quiet, dark and heavy on the spooky. It seems slow but the way the story creeps in before you know it, you too are obsessed with Angelica..

Rebecca is obsessed with this old falling down house, she's an artist looking for a muse, something to spark thst creativity that seems to be alluding her and what better place than a house haunted by a little girl, who is lonely.

The time lines mix and cross as we follow along, leaning about the history of the house and of Angelica.

Drawing you in deeper just like the obsession Rebecca has with searching for that spark, that idea to make her art flow again, but the desperation drives her deeper into the houses mysteries loosing herself.

Sometimes you don't need a ghost to haunt a place and sometimes you are your own haunting obsession.

Loved the art, it really lent to the vibes in this book as you read it.

[E Kemper · Rating 5 out of 5]

Things I liked about Pixerina:

Beautifully written.
Tightly plotted.
Memorable tragic characters.
The suburban setting. I don't read enough books set in Australia.
Great ending!

Things I loved about Pixerina:

The writing and the story had a dreamy, trance-like quality and yet it's a proper page-turner. Couldn't put it down. Kept my up past my bedtime.
I was equally invested in both timelines in this story.
The artwork included, and the descriptions of the art, are stunning and contribute to the dreamy atmosphere of the story.
It reminded me of all those magical secret garden stories I've always loved. I wanted to jump through the pages and wander those haunted halls and overgrown pathways alongside the main characters.

Looking forward to checking out more by this author!
Thank you Bad Hand Books for the eARC for review.