... [H]e can step imperceptibly from deadpan funny to deeply affecting truth with an utterly transparent style that has the reader racing down the page [and] has the rare ability to say profound things simply.

"[5] Terry McGarry in the webzine Strange Horizons noted that "[d]iscovering Richard Parks's fiction is like discovering a wise Zen master pumping gas at a service station or a weathered swami slinging burgers at your favorite corner diner: transcendence in the midst of the ordinary, right where it ought to be.

"[7] In his Locus review, Nick Gevers praised the author as "a quiet, unpretentious storyteller whose work shrewdly inverts expectations, delivers wittily unpredictable homilies, and extracts with painful accuracy the dark experience and twisted emotion covertly underlying familiar, seemingly pellucid, folktale surfaces.

"[8] Paul Di Filippo in Asimov's Science Fiction wrote "[d]eceptively simple, earnest, and tragicomic, Parks's tales convey deep truths beneath narratives that tumble along like limpid streams.

Whether exploring Oriental mythologies, or creating Dunsanyian wonderlands, Parks delivers stories that are rooted very tangibly in specific times and places, yet which are underpinned by eternal issues.