The Ghost War / Richard Parks. Canemill Publishing, 2020 (paperback, ebook), ©2012 (ebook). 173 pages.

One of the best things for a reader of Richard Parks is that most of his fiction is available in e-book. Which, conversely, if you prefer your books in paper form, is also one of the worst things, because a fair amount of his work is only available in e-book. Which just shows that traditional publishers have a screw loose somewhere, because his stuff is really, really good.I like my books on paper, but also like Parks, so, thank God for e-books.

The Ghost War, originally published in 2012, is one of Parks’s earlier novels, and not one that’s appeared in print. [Correction: it was reissued in print at the same time it was reissued as an ebook.] I presume the book made the rounds of traditional publishers before being consigned to the aether, but they inexplicably passed on it. Don’t let that stop you from plucking it from the cloud and into your own personal e-reader. It’s a wonderful read. As an early work, one might expect it to exhibit a certain beginner’s hesitancy. Nope! Parks juggles an assortment of well-defined characters and intricate plot elements with expertise and grace. He gives us a story with a sympathetic heroine in the young witch Calia, who faces an intimidating, seemingly insoluble problem with daunting stakes for her world. Something terrible is gradually infecting all witches with insanity—and this in a world whose witches have quite enough trouble already, thank you. Just as in ours, the mundane population fears and persecutes her kind. With a deck stacked steeply against her and new horrors confronting Calia at every twist in the plot, this book is a page-turner. (Or would be, if there were physical pages to turn. But don’t get me started.)

About the only indication of uncertainty I detected was geographical—if you mapped the terrain covered by the various characters’ journeys, I’m pretty sure it would pass north and south several times over much the same territory. But that’s a minor quibble. If I had to settle on a major one, it would be in how the whole problem of the plot turns on the petty action of a long dead combatant in a long-settled battle, which has kept the spirit realm a-roil ever since and must be revisited and resolved lest everything fall apart. Even so, man, does it make for a brisk, thumping story!

Parks’s writing is full of fun surprises for those widely read in it, and this piece is no exception. The first couple chapters originally appeared as a separate short story, “Daughter of the Heartwood” (1987), which gives them a trajectory and resolution slightly aside from those of the novel as a whole, though leading nicely into the greater flow. Less apparent is a subsequent Easter egg; late in the story we learn that Taleera, the mature witch who mentors Calia, has a history with a northern clan they must win to their side. It’s germane to the action, but the reader may sense there’s more to it than we’re told—and there is. Parks doesn’t say so here, but Taleera’s past entanglement is the subject of another short story, “Sessinahn” (1979), one of the first he ever published.

One fascinating aspect of the book involves the way its magical folk cast their souls into the forms of animals whose spirits are evoked through carvings of natural materials they somehow imprinted on. The raven form occasionally adopted by Calia is one example; another is an inconceivably antique and savage creature resurrected in a stone carving. While not made explicit in the text, this is plainly a dinosaur of the velociraptor type, or something like it. Is it odd that a fantasy world might have had its own Mesozoic era? Maybe. But in the sure hands of Richard Parks, it works.

Another highlight is Calia and Taleera’s visit to the undead “survivors” of an age-old empire long since crumbled to dust, devoted to preserving and extending its ancient knowledge. They’re polite horrors, but horrors all the same, and not in the least bit safe for the living to consort with. To resort to them for information is to take a long, long step back in time, and hazards one’s life, at the very least.

The Ghost War has just (2020) been reissued with a new e-cover and slight tweaks to the text. The new cover comes because the old one confused a previous reviewer. Featuring a mass of ghostly warriors reminiscent of the terracotta army of Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang, it suggested to that worthy a far eastern fantasy rather than the “generic” medieval setting of the actual content. I thought it was fine, but the new cover, showing the raven form used by the protagonist, is fine too.

Summing up, this is a wonderful, magical book If you’ve read Richard Parks before, but not The Ghost War, it’s one more must-have. If you’ve never read him, it’s a fine place to start. Jump on board! You won’t regret it!

Five out of five stars.

—Brian.