Praise for Arvida

“Stephen King with a Quebecois accent.”—National Post

“Archibald’s writing is clean and his imagery strong.”—Publishers Weekly

“These are American stories. But another America, a hidden America, maybe even more American than the America we think we know … These are stories that can only evolve in the imagination, and stories that can do that are a kind of true sustenance.”—Asymptote

“The four stories that structure [Arvida] expand beyond the working-class town into a fantasy Arvida with mysterious creatures and ghosts and confront Archibald’s sources and power as a storyteller.”—World Literature Today

“Arvida is simply fantastic. This is the best book of Canadian short stories I’ve read since Mavis Gallant.”—Nick Mount, The Walrus

“It’s a strange world, even if we do our best to remain blind to its strangeness. Samuel Archibald’s stories make this point by way of a tasty mash-up of genres and tropes, from horror cinema to domestic drama to schoolyard mythology. This is fiction that taps a Jungian vein instead of delivering rational ‘understanding,’ and is all the richer for it.”—Andrew Pyper, CBC Books

“There’s a dark, hard presence in the stories … lurking like an animal in the undergrowth.”—Montreal Gazette

“Eerily effective … Archibald?s interest is in how the past imposes itself on the present, both in the intimate form of family histories and against the larger backdrop of a community that exists slightly out of time … What?s fascinating is the sense of people haunted by a place instead of the other way around.”—Quill & Quire, starred review

“These short stories operate like a dark mirror reflecting the vicious barbarism hidden beneath the staid surface of quotidian small town life.”—New York Journal of Books

“Archibald tells stories from the end of the world with mythic force.”—Le Devoir

“Between fables and myths, true stories and tall tales ? Samuel Archibald?s Arvida updates the chilling stories we used to tell each other around the campfire ? A storyteller is born.”—La Presse

“[In Arvida] the reader navigates between the fantastic and regional folklore, put at the service of exhilarating tales, polished, free-flowing in their structures, and mingled with childhood memories and Gothic storytelling. A truly distinctive voice has appeared ?”—Voir