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Wondering At Big Things
The Last Ghost follows a man raised by his grandparents after his parents’ tragic death, who has a passion for technology and an understanding of business, leading him to live a successful but solitary life. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
That’s an interesting question. When I was a boy, my brother and I were sometimes left for extended periods with my paternal grandparents. The life they led was not all like the lives of our parents – they had different values and very different ways of viewing the world.
I loved being part of their world for even a short while – it was like stepping back in time and living a slower life. In its pace there was time for savouring small things and wondering at big things.
After my grandparents died that world was closed to me, but I never forgot its lessons. But what if I had? Worse, what if I had never been lucky enough to learn them in the first place? The realities of contemporary life – virtual connections in particular – can erode a sense of community, of belonging, of the responsibility to be considerate.
The idea of a full life as a true measure of a successful life appealed to me. I guess that was the inspiration for The Last Ghost.
Were you able to achieve everything you wanted with the character of Joshua Stewart in the novel?
What I wanted was to give the reader a picture of how Joshua developed and changed over nearly three decades of living. What I tried to do was to suggest the reasons for his actions – his ways of thinking, of applying both reason and desire to his actions.
My work is just the start, though. The reader’s imagination puts the real flesh on the bones. For sure, you need to give readers enough to go on, but its important to leave them room to think, to imagine, and to draw conclusions. If you fill in all the blanks, you preclude that from happening. Readers are like the audience of a play – indispensable to the story-telling.
What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?
First and foremost, our disconnected world. What happens to a person when the value and importance of the next person is lost through lack of human contact?
How does that disconnectedness wear away our ethics? How easy does it become to commit a small evil when you can’t begin to understand the human consequences?
How does one small evil lead to larger ones? And what is the cost to a person’s being?
What is the next book that you are working on, and when can your fans expect it to be out?
I am working on the fourth book in The Scandalous Memoirs of General John Torrance series of historical fiction adventures. The working title is Jack and Will and I’m hoping that it will be published in late December.
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Josh’s family dwindles away and his real friends become his employees. His social life becomes nocturnal and empty of real meaning. He an otherwise solitary life, making more money than he needs, and facilitated by every modern convenience.
But there comes an unexpected occurrence, one that radically changes Josh’s needs and purpose.
The Last Ghost
The Last Ghost tells the story of Joshua Stewart, a boy who loses his parents in a tragic fire in Thailand and is raised by his aging grandparents in Toronto. What begins as a quiet, tender domestic story about loss and love evolves into a moving reflection on family, morality, and the strange intersection between faith and logic. It’s a coming-of-age story shaped by grief, education, and a world that seems to change faster than anyone can understand. The book carries Joshua from childhood through adolescence, from the safety of his grandfather’s theological certainty to the uncertainty of global chaos and financial collapse. In the background are ghosts, literal and figurative, the memories and moral lessons that cling to life long after the living are gone.
The prose is elegant but warm, never showy. Author D.E. Ring writes dialogue that feels alive, filled with pauses and silences that say more than the words themselves. The pacing is slow in the best way. I found myself caring deeply for Caleb and Marianne, those kind, weary grandparents trying to raise a boy while the modern world races past them. Joshua’s curiosity, his moral sense, and his grief are rendered so gently that when emotion hits, it hits hard. I caught myself tearing up more than once. The way Ring balances tragedy with moments of simple beauty, a walk by the lake, a child’s question about God, is fantastic. It’s literary without being pretentious, and it touches something primal about family and forgiveness.
That said, this isn’t a light read. The novel asks you to think. Some chapters stretch with patient detail about conversation or setting. The story builds a world that feels lived in. So much so that when the supernatural edges in, it feels believable. Ring doesn’t write jump-scares or gothic gloom. His ghosts come through in memory, regret, and the quiet ways people haunt one another. I loved that restraint. It’s the kind of ghost story that leaves you thinking rather than trembling. Still, I found myself haunted anyway, not by spirits, but by love, loss, and how time slips away no matter how much we hold on.
I’d recommend The Last Ghost to readers who love literary fiction with heart, people who appreciate family sagas, subtle hauntings, and moral reflection. It’s for those who like their ghost stories human, not horrific. I’d hand it to anyone who believes that real hauntings come from memory, conscience, and the ache of unfinished love.
Pages: 291 | ASIN : B0FS1W4T5Q
A Shared Gift
Death and His Brother follows a group of musicians, an inspector, and his reporter wife who discover that no one is manning their train, and it is a race to stop the runaway train. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
When I was a boy, we lived in a house on the edge of a small town. We were surrounded by meadows and beyond those, fields of corn and barley. Beyond that, there was a railway line. On it, three times a day on round trips, ran a Buddliner coach – a single-carriage commuter train – with no locomotive. Self-propelled. It travelled about eighty miles on each round trip, with a small two-person crew. It ran between Stratford, Ontario – the home of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival – and a town on the shores of Lake Huron.
Theatre, music, train travel, water.
I think the train, the theatre, and the lake have been rolling around together in my head for a long time. That little Buddliner didn’t have the look or romance of a big passenger train, but it must have taken interesting people to places that some of them really wanted to visit.
A year ago, I happened upon a poem, “The Clattering Train,” in which a sleeping two-man railway crew could not prevent a fatal accident. Not a great poem, but it was based on a real accident in England in the 1890s. The image of a sleeping crew brought to mind the two-person Buddliner. And so, a mystery began to take shape.
Why were they asleep?
I found the interaction between the characters that meet on the train to be one of the highlights of your book. What was your approach to writing the interactions between characters?
I was an actor for years and a director and playwright. Handling dialogue becomes second nature after a while, but it’s a learned skill. It’s all about exploring.
Each character enters a scene – whether on stage or in a book – from somewhere. They are in a state of mind; they already are someone, whether we know them or not. The important thing in developing sound interactions between and amongst characters is staying true to who they are.
That’s not to say my characters can’t surprise me. They do all the time.
As a director, I used to advise actors who were having a hard time incorporating a particular line into their performance that they needed to go back and rethink their characterization.
The line that has been so difficult is almost always important – it usually represents something in the character that you’ve overlooked.
The same thing happens when I write conversations in my novels. Characters often say things I do not expect them to say. When it happens, I have to rethink the character. Who are they really? What is it that they really want out of the conversation? The characters are sometimes more articulate than I am.
I go back and revise what I’ve written to reflect these new dimensions of a character. When people are talking, they are exploring each other. Learning, telling, hiding, showing off.
But here’s the really important thing: it’s not who says what that makes dialogue work. It’s how the next person reacts. And that’s always down to the same thing. Who’s listening?
What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?
Kindness and generosity, especially in the face of difficulty.
Listening – and there’s no better example of that than a jazz player.
The pain of the outsider and how it’s so often hidden and hard to reach.
Humour in the bleak moments. Humour is a shared gift; it’s how we all get through things together.
Will there be another Urquhart & MacDonald mystery in the future? If so, what can your fans expect in the next installment?
Absolutely.
I plan on at least one new Urquhart & MacDonald mystery each year, maybe two – along with a new historical adventure novel in my General Torrance Series.
The next book, The Price of Peril, will be the seventh in the Urquhart and MacDonald series. This book will concentrate more on the women in the community, four in particular: Sandy Urquhart, Connie Del Barba, Florrie MacDonald, and an old friend of Sandy’s we haven’t met before – an aviator raising money to fund a dangerous flight that has never before been accomplished, neither by man nor woman.
It will be set in Cape Breton, as always. It’s an island of determined folk with a lively appreciation of life’s absurdities. That’s how they get through a life that’s not always easy. But here’s the thing — they also have a long history of invention and daring, including up in the skies.
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Death and His Brother
Death and His Brother opens with a striking mix of glamour, grit, and unease. A group of musicians, headed to Cape Breton for a new hotel opening, meet fellow travelers on a sleek new train. The stage is set with vivid detail, from the bustling station in Truro to the eccentricities of Connie Del Barba, the formidable hotelier behind The Gramercy’s revival. The plot quickly tightens when the train barrels out of control, its crew incapacitated, and a runaway crisis collides with the lives of the passengers. Parallel storylines weave between Musetta Burrell, a young singer returning home, and Inspector Jimmy Urquhart and Sandy, his sharp-witted reporter wife, who are drawn into the chaos. The novel fuses historical setting, mystery, and human drama into a fast-moving and layered tale.
I really enjoyed how alive the writing feels. The dialogue is quick, sharp, and often funny. The banter between musicians felt natural, like eavesdropping on old friends, while Connie Del Barba’s wit nearly jumps off the page. At the same time, the looming dread of the runaway train gave me goosebumps. Author D.E. Ring has a knack for balancing humor and terror in the same breath, and I found myself alternately grinning and gripping the edges of the book. I’ll admit, a few stretches of description slowed me down, but even then, the sense of place and period kept me invested. The atmosphere, postwar Nova Scotia buzzing with ambition, music, and social change, stayed with me.
I also felt a deep affection for the way the book handles community and identity. The portrayal of Black musicians navigating a predominantly white world, and Connie’s insistence on giving them dignity and top billing, resonated with me on an emotional level. The book doesn’t whitewash prejudice, yet it shows resilience and solidarity. Musetta’s mix of ambition and insecurity felt painfully real, and Jimmy and Sandy’s domestic moments gave the story a grounding warmth. At times, I felt overwhelmed by the sheer number of characters and moving parts, but once I relaxed into the rhythm, it became part of the book’s charm, like stepping into a crowded room where everyone has a story.
Death and His Brother is a ride worth taking. It’s a mystery, yes, but also a lively portrait of people chasing music, purpose, and survival. I’d recommend it to readers who love classic detective fiction with a heartbeat, to those who enjoy historical settings rich with detail, and to anyone who wants a story that makes you laugh even while it makes your pulse race. It’s a book for late nights when you don’t mind losing sleep, because the train is moving and you don’t want to get off.
Pages: 242 | ASIN : B0FDX58QMG
Our Humanity Is Always Under Threat
Witcracker is a comedic exploration of family, tradition, and absurdity, set in a Jacobean mansion-turned-tourist-trap where chaos reigns as business and personal lives collide. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I’m going to try to answer this without needing a Spoiler Alert.
Right. The inspiration for the novel is real. It came from an old and world-famous European treasure whose construction is, let’s say, surprising. It could easily have been built differently. What if it had been? What if another version – just as ancient and just as authentic – were found? Somebody would stand to make a lot of money.
How could this happen in North America? Dozens of ancient buildings from Europe were bought and rebuilt here early in the 20th Century. That’s a fact. Many of their owners fell on hard times and many buildings became tourist destinations.
One tourist destination I know pretty well is the area around Niagara Falls. There are millions of visitors annually. The tourist trade can’t live on a twenty-minute visit to the Falls. New attractions capitalize on tourists with money in their pockets and time on their hands: amusement parks, winery tours, theatre. Businesses, big and small, thrive on predictable trade. A new world-famous treasure in the mix is not just an opportunity, it’s also a threat.
Every possible tool will be used – from lucrative offers to media disinformation and even sabotage. What could be more normal?
Start with ordinary people and build an extraordinary – and predictable – chain of events.
How do you balance humor with deeper themes like commercialization and human relationships in your storytelling?
That’s a great question, but I’d like to turn it on its head. How do I balance commercialization and digital tools with the deeper themes of humour and human relationships?
Our humanity is always under threat and our resilience has been forever supported by a sense of humour, a sense of what is absurd, and a sense of what is truly important. That doesn’t mean threats are not real. They are, but we can survive – even get stronger – if we don’t knuckle under to fear.
Ordinary people, stubborn and funny and generous in equal measure, are always humanity’s best hope. We can’t forget that.
I tried to show that in the storytelling by asking a simple question: what would that character do when faced with a particular challenge?
The dialogue feels so natural and relatable. Are any characters or conversations inspired by real-life experiences?
Sure. Like all writers, I’m a thief. A little bit of this person, a little bit of that. A little bit of this place and add some of that.
I’ve worked in a carnival, on a newspaper, in tourist attractions, in advertising, in theatres. I know how they work and what their challenges are.
I’ve written a lot of plays and you learn how dialogue works. When you get down to it, plays are just what the character says (or sings, which is really just slow talking). The rest, the scenery, the costumes, the actors – are outside the playwright’s control. You write knowing they will give the story form and substance. But they’re not in the script.
I figure dialogue in a book can work the same way – except I have a much bigger production crew. The space between the ears of the reader can hold a lot of people and scenery. I try not to get in the way.
The characters are normal people – I know them, including what motivates them. Naturally, they enter a conversation with different motives. What they hear is what sparks their response. Whether they change their opinions is a question of balancing character, determination, and listening.
Can you share insights into your process of crafting such a diverse and eccentric cast of characters?
Everybody can seem eccentric if you only see part of their character. Comedy relies on ordinary people dealing with increasingly extraordinary events. That will always bring out the very best and the very worst of people. I go where the characters take me. I trust them.
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Witcracker
Witcracker, by D.E. Ring, is a richly layered comedic novel that blends eccentric family dynamics with the oddities of running an entertainment empire from a repurposed historic estate. The story primarily unfolds in Cheadle Hall, a Jacobean mansion turned tourist attraction, with its family of owners navigating personal entanglements and corporate absurdities. While humor permeates every page, deeper themes about tradition, commercialization, and human relationships are skillfully woven into the narrative.
The writing is sharp, witty, and unapologetically quirky. D.E. Ring’s flair for crafting humorous, relatable dialogue shines throughout. Early in the book, the scenes between Maureen and Rick—filled with mundane yet hilariously relatable exchanges about breakfast and noise—set a casual, comedic tone. The rhythm of these interactions creates a delightful pace that keeps the story flowing smoothly. Ring’s satirical take on the commercialization of history is brilliant. The depiction of CH Entertainment’s absurd business ventures, like the wax museum and the Tudor-era cosplay tourism, hilariously critiques how modern enterprises commodify cultural heritage. The narrative cleverly pokes fun at both the entrepreneurs behind these attractions and the tourists who consume them, emphasizing our collective hunger for curated nostalgia.
The characters are a treasure trove of eccentricities. Sir Derek’s disheveled charm and Fiona’s no-nonsense pragmatism provide a perfect counterbalance to the more modern Scarlett MacDevitt, who is fiercely ambitious yet often blindsided by the irrationalities of human behavior. Scarlett’s professional coldness, juxtaposed with her budding romance, adds emotional depth to her character. A standout moment is Derek’s comical yet insightful musings on irrationality as the true driver of human actions—a theme subtly reflected in every character’s arc.
Witcracker is a wonderfully chaotic blend of comedy, social commentary, and familial drama. Its humor is dry, often absurd, and steeped in a keen understanding of human nature. This book would be perfect for fans of satirical novels. If you enjoy sharp dialogue, a cast of colorful characters, and stories that make you laugh while pondering the quirks of society, you’ll find this book an absolute delight.
Pages: 304 | ASIN: B0DH3WSC14
Witcracker
D.E. Ring’s Witcracker is a lively, fast-paced novel that brilliantly blends comedy with sharp social critique. The story revolves around the Gregory family, who have seen better days but are now grappling with financial ruin. Their once-proud estate is reduced to a shadow of its former self, and leasing out the land seems like their only option. But a sudden twist of fate promises a reversal of fortune: the discovery of an ancient, handwritten version of Romeo and Juliet where, in a surprising turn, the lovers live. This find is a potential treasure trove—if the family can navigate the eccentricities and challenges of the theater world.
As the Gregorys dive into this new venture, the novel takes off with a flurry of madcap schemes and unexpected twists. The family’s naïveté, especially after years of wealth and privilege, adds a layer of comedy. Their assumption that prosperity will simply return, fueled by this literary oddity, sets the stage for a series of often absurd, yet hilarious, missteps. Their attempt to rise back to society’s upper echelons is met with resistance, but the Gregorys are undeterred, ready to manipulate the theater world to their advantage—even if that world isn’t quite so eager to welcome them.
At its heart, Witcracker is a comedy, but its humor ranges from the witty to the absurd. In many ways, it channels the irreverence of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, with moments that echo the chaotic energy of Michael Frayn’s Noises Off. The Gregory family—particularly Derek, Lou, Mary, and Sara—are all varying degrees of clueless, yet their antics drive the story forward in entertaining and unpredictable ways.
Balancing out the family’s folly is Canon Stewart, a character whose steady, grounding presence keeps the plot from veering too far into the absurd. His role is crucial, providing much-needed stability amid the whirlwind of comedic chaos. Without him, the wild conceits of the novel might become overwhelming, but Ring’s clever writing ensures that the humor never wears thin.
What elevates Witcracker beyond mere farce is its underlying critique of modern society. Through biting dialogue and keen social commentary, the novel offers pointed observations on everything from technology to art to business. Ring’s sharp wit makes for a comedy that not only entertains but also provokes thought, weaving humor and insight together in a way that feels fresh and engaging.
Witcracker is a delightful read, full of energy and wit. Its clever mix of humor and satire ensures that it remains both entertaining and thought-provoking, delivering laughs while also holding a mirror up to society’s absurdities. It’s a novel that doesn’t just aim to amuse but also to make readers think, ensuring it stands out in the comedy genre.
Pages: 304 | ASIN : B0DH3WSC14
LITERARY TITAN 