Praise for Arvida
“Stephen King with a Quebecois accent.”—Paul Marchand, 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
"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, sometimes wry, sometimes muted, but always lurking like an animal in the undergrowth.”—Montreal Gazette
"An intriguing collection of short stories ... A melancholic tone haunts each retrospective recasting of the past [in these tales], and the vain project of reminiscence is examined with intelligence and emotional acuity."—Pasha Malla, The Globe & Mail
"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
"Archibald would already deserve a wheelbarrow’s worth of kudos for this book’s nervy, expertly rendered sentences, its polished prose. But what separates Arvida from its peers ... is the fact that Archibald so thoroughly subverts many of our expectations about what this kind of short story collection can do, or should do, or dares to do."—Numéro Cinq
“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’s descriptions bridge the [real and the unreal], always incredibly physical—visceral and unsettling....these are stories of stories, what they do, what life becomes through them, and why they should be passed on."—Québec Reads
"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
"Arvida is a must-read. It is a beacon in contemporary Québec literature, a book that will change something in you ..."—Stéphanie Pelletier, Le mouton NOIR
"Archibald pays homage to [Stephen] King, [but Arvida]'s more than contemporary imitation"—The Chronicle Herald
2015-08-18
Ghost stories, fables, and childhood memories from the great white north. Perhaps the personal nature of these stories combined with their specific geographic setting will make them more meaningful to readers in Francophone Canada. Unfortunately, this translated collection's purposeful ambiguity and painterly writing style make the entries feel more like impressions of scenes rather than solid stories. Most of the tales are set in the title village, a small industrial community north of Quebec City. The opener, "My Father and Proust," and its companion piece, "The Centre of Leisure and Forgetfulness," are generic memoirs about childhood. Others are anomalies like "América," a crime caper about an attempt to smuggle a woman over the border, and "Jigai," an eerie portrait of a self-mutilating refugee. Much of the collection attempts to mimic classical gothicism. "Cryptozoology" portrays a strange creature in the woods from the point of view of an adolescent boy. "A Mirror in the Mirror" is a slight tale about a woman who pines away for an absent playwright and ultimately becomes the ghost that haunts him. A triptych of stories labeled "Blood Sisters" concern themselves with the monsters that roam the lives of girls. In the final sequence of the trilogy, "Paris in the Rain," a woman is left alone in a morgue with the dismembered body of a man. "God is love and that's why he's terrible," she says. "You can't live, knowing that. You can just destroy your life and destroy your body and push others away and hurt others. You can just be evil and I was evil all the time and it's your fault and the fault of the stupid God who loved you like he loved me, of God who loved you, big dirty dog, and who loved me, damaged little girl." An uneven collection of stories about cruel men, enigmatic women, and frightened children.
