There was something about the old house that intrigued Rebecca Bell. Now the artist has become infatuated with the building, its history, the people who inhabited it, especially the young girl whose spirit lingers inside the house and its grounds.
Angelica has been waiting so long for someone to finally notice her. For someone just to be her friend. For someone to care about her even after she passed away.
Meeting Rebecca is a boon for both of them.
Angelica believes she’s gaining a friend, while Rebecca is gaining a muse. Time will tell if the two of them will come to some kind of understanding. Will the dark history at the heart of Pixerina’s decayed foundations repeat itself?
Why we’re excited about this book:
Can a person haunt a ghost? Readers might get an answer to this question with Joanne Anderton’s latest. Anderton is the author of the Veiled World series, Debris, Suited, and Guardian, the children’s picture book The Flying Optometrist, and the story collections Inanimates: Tales of Everyday Fear, The Art of Broken Things, and The Bone Chime Song and Other Stories. Her short fiction has appeared in such publications as Midnight Echo, The Dark, Bloodlines: 16 Journeys on the Dark Streets of Urban Fantasy, and Aurum: A Golden Anthology of Original Australian Fantasy, to name a few. With her latest, Anderton presents a tale of ghostly obsession that questions our perception of spirits and who is the one being haunted. Alan Baxter (Sallow Bend, The Gulp) says: “Pixerina is an Australian gothic masterpiece. A haunting, deeply melancholy exploration of the dangerous sentimentality of nostalgia, digging at the wounds of loss, of grief, or regret, and of the making of painful decisions. It’s about a haunted house, though perhaps the house itself does the haunting, it’s about ghosts though perhaps the ghosts are the ones who fear. It’s about art and muses, about neglect and obsession, and it’s unflinching in its reach.”, and Angela Slatter (The Crimson Road) says: “Pixerina flirts with the dark heart of art and self. A suburban gothic exploration of ghosts and broken girls, and timelines twined around each other like DNA strands are the only things holding the world together. Beautifully, gently haunting.”
Releasing from Bad Hand Books 28 April 2026, Pixerina by Joanne Anderton is available for pre-order now.
BOB PASTORELLA