When Keith Blalock leaves his Appalachian mountain home to join the Confederate Army, he intends to serve only long enough to collect his cash bounty. He is a Union sympathizer, who hopes to quickly discharge his obligation to the Confederacy.

He leaves his wife with promises of a swift return, but Malinda, we soon learn, has ideas of her own. After ensuring that their animals are cared for, Malinda chops her hair short, dresses as a boy, and enlists in the army as "Sam," Keith's supposed younger brother.

The two are discharged soon after - when Keith rolls in some poisonous mountain plants to bring on an ugly and contagious-looking skin rash, and Malinda reveals her gender - and when the Confederate Army calls Keith to rejoin once he has healed, the two head for higher ground. They soon become deadly mountain outlaws fighting for the Union.

The Blalock pair forms only a single strand in Sharyn McCrumb's complex and compelling new novel Ghost Riders, a story that jumps in time from the Civil War era to current times. Alternating chapters also introduce us to the voices of: North Carolina's Civil War Governor Zebulon Vance, an authentic historical figure whose experiences add a sense of higher society political warfare; Nora Bonesteel and Rattler, two contemporary Appalachian locals with the ability to see ghosts of the past; Tom Gentry, a suicidal modernist who heads to the mountains to die peacefully; and Spencer Arrowood, another 20th-century local with a fascination for the complexities of his own Confederate/Union past.

And while Rattler and Nora nervously try to reconcile a new era with the still-restless ghosts of the Civil War, SUV-driving Civil War re-enactors set up mock encampments across the old 19th-century battlegrounds.

The novel opens with Rattler as a child. Standing on his front porch late at night, he thinks he sees several Civil War-era outlaws on horseback. As he speaks to them, he realizes they are ghosts, the first of many he will see throughout his life. Reflecting on that early vision and the contemporary re-enactors he has come to know, he introduces the political entanglements that still irk the Appalachian men and women of McCrumb's world.

"You would have thought that losing the war one time would be enough for them. You certainly would have thought that, wouldn't you? As much sorrow and ruin and hatred among neighbors as was brought to these here hills by that sorry war, you would have thought they'd all be glad they missed out on it by being born a hundred years or so after the fact. They ought to be shut of it by now, ready to let the past bury its dead, and get on with the business of making a less terrible future. But no.

"Oh, no.

"They will not turn loose of that war."

Shortly, we find ourselves flitting from past to present and back again, listening to a chorus of Vietnam-like disgruntlement over a war whose sides were horribly unclear and whose outcome surely would be ugly.

McCrumb's most compelling characters unquestionably are the Blalocks, Keith and Malinda. True Appalachian historical figures whom McCrumb has fictionalized, the Blalocks are the uneducated but thoughtfully intelligent voice of the mountain people.

When Keith first leaves to join the Confederacy, for example, Malinda is sorry to see her young husband go, but she refuses to let her sorrow get the best of her:

"I watched him go down the hill until the laurel bushes blotted out the last little glimpse of his hat, and then I set out to chopping fire wood, not because we needed any - Keith had seen to that - but because it felt good to bring that blade down on something hard, and I reckoned the wood splitting would do me as much good as crying - maybe more, because at least I'd have some kindling to show for it afterward."

While McCrumb's tapestry of voices is admirable, some of her lesser- tapped characters only succeed in distracting us. The author also borders dangerously on unnecessary didacticism when she occasionally reminds us why she has written this novel in the first place: "You should remember," Nora Bonesteel warns the Civil War re-enactors at the novel's close. "Remember what all this anger and hatred leads to, and what it feels like. Yes, you remember." She nodded her head toward the shadows. "It's them that has to forget."

McCrumb is an accomplished best-selling author with such titles as The Ballad of Frankie Silver, The Rosewood Casket, and She Walks These Hills to her credit. Despite its flaws, Ghost Riders will make a notable addition to an oeuvre that explores her colorful Southern heritage.

Jennie A. Camp's reviews and short stories have appeared in "Prairie Schooner," "Colorado Review," and other publications. She lives in Platteville.