In his first novel, Mersault contre-enquête (2013), Kamel Daoud names the unnamed “Arabe” from Albert Camus’s L’Étranger Musa and gives him a family to demonstrate how an event that served as a mere backdrop for Camus’s existential musings transformed the lives of Musa’s entire family. The novel caused a sensation in France and much of the Western world, garnering multiple prizes, including the prestigious Prix Goncourt du premier roman, and translations in multiple languages, including English; however, its reception in Algeria has been much more critical due partially Daoud’s politics as expressed through his weekly newspaper column. Though Daoud is currently receiving the most attention for his engagement with Camus’s work, he is far from the only Algerian author to engage with Camus’s oeuvre. Spectres of Camus haunt many Algerian novels, from the early francophone novels of the 1950s to the novels of Assia Djebar and other contemporary authors, such as Hamid Grine. Be it with subtle gestures, such as a quotation at the beginning of a chapter, or through a narrative that explicitly centers on the pied-noir author, Algerian authors have continued to engage with Camus’s writing. These references are complicated by Camus’s position in Algerian literary society; he is critiqued for failing to present multidimensional Algerian characters or an honest portrait of Algerian society, even though the much of his work is set in or inspired by his childhood in Algeria. This paper analyzes the various ways Camus has been (re)written by the Algerian writer and how these works have been received in the West and in Algeria, lingering on the question of why a body of work that has been criticized for its absence of Algerians has nevertheless dominated their collective literary imagination. Examining the ways in which Camus—who straddles the line between Algerian and Frenchman—has been refracted through the lens of the Algerian writer sheds further light on the connections between Algeria and France, demonstrating the extent to which the spectre of colonization continues to haunt postcolonial Algeria. If authors such as Daoud do indeed see the French language as a “bien vacant,” they strives to fill it by (re)inserting the Algerian into cannoical French narratives such as Camus’s. Just as the French presence changed Algeria, Algerians impacted French culture, and Algerian writers’ creative (re)interpretations of Camus not only invite, but force, his readers to confront this fact.