How SA Cosby balances internal and external tension in King of Ashes

SA Cosby’s King of Ashes is a taut, propulsive thriller as well as a nuanced, moving portrait of a “tragic hero,” to use Cosby’s own description of his protagonist. This is Cosby’s fifth book, and he skillfully manages the internal and external tension to give readers a thrilling plot ride, layered over a rich exploration of pain, loss, and the human capacity for both violence and forgiveness. In this essay, we’ll explore how he maintains that balance, seeing where he prioritizes action and where he prioritizes theme and character exploration.

Here’s an overall snapshot of the novel, tracking the rise and fall of external tension (action, what’s happening to the characters or what they are doing) and internal tension (what the characters are feeling).

Because this is a thriller, the highest stakes are life and death, which I’ve scored at five. Notice also that there are several chapters with a “2003” label rather than a number. These are flashback chapters (and one epilogue at the end), which I’ll talk about separately.

Cosby doesn’t identify acts or parts in the structure of the book, but for the sake of analysis I’ve identified a three-act structure that tracks key points in Roman’s development arc:

If you look along the EKG graph of the novel, you can see that Cosby draws readers in with two high-intensity spikes in Act 1, then lowers the external temperature through Act 2 to focus on internal character development, including the first flashback chapter that is set on the day of their mother’s death. Act 2 ends with another spike of violence. Act 3 delivers periodic spikes of external intensity before pausing once more to let internal intensity carry the momentum, building tension as we approach the climactic finale.

Before we look at each act in more detail, I want to note one more pattern across the novel as a whole. Cosby keeps us focused on two major story questions: First, will Roman be able to keep his family safe? This is the ‘frontstory’ question. Second, what happened to Roman’s mother? This is the backstory question, and Cosby uses flashback chapters (see the gray dots labeled 2003 on the graph) to take us directly into the dead-mother plot. The chapters cover a single day, the day she died, and have their own internal suspense. By the end of the second of these three backstory chapters, we know we are going to see what really happened in the next one, which becomes part of the novel’s climax.

Now, let’s dig further into each act to see how each one works and how Cosby’s choices affect our experience as readers.

After a long absence, Roman returns to his hometown of Jefferson Run, Virginia after learning his father is in a coma following a car accident. When he arrives, the problems immediately escalate: The car accident was suspicious, Roman’s sister Neveah is struggling under the weight of running the crematorium their parents worked long hours to establish, and his brother Dante confesses he is in debt to a local gang. The accident also renews the mystery of their mother’s disappearance twenty years earlier. Cosby introduces the backstory question first; chapter 1 opens with Roman dreaming of his mother. (Read my analysis of the opening.)

After the initial gut punch of the news about Roman’s father, the pace slows for a couple chapters as Cosby gives us a tour of a broken town and a broken family, one that has never recovered from the disappearance of Roman’s mother. Roman already knows that he can’t promise his sister he will fix everything: “he had no desire to be the King of Ashes. That title belonged to his father, and Roman was content to let it live on through him or burn with him.” There’s also a quiet moment when Roman has arrived back at this childhood home and is looking out at the backyard and thinking about the fragility of human existence: “the woods waited, ever encroaching, waiting, perhaps, for the day men flipped a switch or dropped a beaker and snuffed out the light of human existence like a child blowing out a candle.” Humans are more fragile and less patient than nature—we are also prone to thoughtless self-destruction. Cosby uses these quiet chapters to ring some theme gongs, giving them a chance to resound.

In chapter 4, Dante confesses to Roman that he’s in debt to the BBB gang, run by a pair of brothers named Tranquil and Torrent—we, along with Roman, understand the true gravity of this confession soon after when a man nonchalantly throws a mug of flaming alcohol across the hood of Dante’s car. Roman accepts the call now; this, he believes, he can fix. Chapter 6, which I analyzed in detail here, is the intense midpoint of the first act: Roman’s plans are met with violence; he loses his teeth and Dante loses a little finger; and ultimately Roman is forced to make “a bargain with the devil” to keep them both alive. For the first time, Roman is not in control of where the plot goes next.

After this explosion of violence, we get two more quiet chapters. This is a pattern Jack Bickham calls “scene and sequel”: an action beat followed by a sequel containing emotion, thought, and decision that leads to another action. I think Cosby is especially skilled at the sequel beats, and he has rich thematic and character territory to explore in King of Ashes. For example, in chapter 7, Cosby explores the markers of poverty and wealth through the plot mechanism of Roman having his busted teeth repaired. As he’s handing his fancy Black Amex to the dentist, he remembers a shameful moment as a child when the school nurse demonstrated he wasn’t brushing his teeth properly. Later in the same chapter, Roman’s sister Neveah is thinking through her affair with a married policeman named Chauncey: “the more she saw of him, the more she realized he was honestly and truly a bad person. Not that that was absolving herself, mind you. But she was doing something bad, she wasn't actually a bad person. There was a difference, no matter how minute.” Cosby is going to continue to force his characters—as well as his readers—to confront the gradations of good and evil, the distinction between action and identity.

In chapter 9, that last spike of intensity you see in Act 1, Roman is forced to learn yet again that he doesn’t have anything under control and that his new plan is just as faulty as his first plan was. This novel is full of best-bad choices, and this chapter delivers a shocking one: Roman and Dante are given the choice between killing Dante’s partner, Getty, in the failed drug deal that put him in debt to the BBB or dying themselves. They burn Getty alive in the crematorium’s oven and must now kill Cassidy, Getty’s girlfriend, whom Dante has also been having an affair with. Dante refuses this particular choice, killing one of the BBB henchmen instead. The brothers regroup as best they can, sending Cassidy into hiding. At the end of Act 1, Roman comforts himself by repeating again and again: “This is not who you are.”

The shape of Act 2 is very different; to start, it’s dominated by internal tension rather than external tension. This is a classic move in action-focused genres: Readers are now hooked, and as a writer you can turn your attention backwards and inwards for a period. Cosby keeps the external, frontstory plot (will Roman be able to keep his family safe?) on a simmer as Roman launches yet another plan, this one so far-reaching and complex that we won’t see its full scope until the end of the novel.

In the meantime, Cosby digs more deeply into the backstory plot. Neveah has, since her father’s accident, become more preoccupied with finding answers about her mother’s disappearance, while part of her dreads what she will find. Between chapters 13 and 14, Cosby also gives us the first flashback chapter, which takes us back to June 2003, the day of their mother’s death. These flashback chapters have an omniscient narrator, who has access to the inner thoughts and feelings, the past and future, of all three siblings. Here’s the end of the first flashback:

Notice the way Cosby uses verb tense here to give us a full orbit around the glowing moon of this backstory plot:

The frontstory and backstory intersect for Roman in the realm of sex, a dynamic we saw at work in the first chapter of the novel when he makes one of his regular visits to a dominatrix before flying home. Here in Act 2, he tries again to steady his nerves ahead of a tense meeting with Torrent and Tranquil. The dominatrix session is a failure, but the brothers agree to his plan and Roman meets their sister Jae, who he senses might be the first woman able to accept both aspects of him.

Act 2 ends with another spike of intensity as the brothers rouse Roman in the middle of the night and summon him to their rural farm, where he discovers they have literally fed one of their disgraced henchmen to their pack of dogs. The sight is a warning to Roman that he may own the knowledge and expertise in the complex construction and money laundering scheme they have agreed to, but Torrent and Tranquil still hold all of the power. Roman, however, thinks he is playing the longer game. We also see that the stress and horrors of the previous chapters—the press of one best-bad choice after another—have shifted his moral compass into a murkier gray area.

Do we believe Roman can take them off the board? Do we, or even Roman himself, believe it will make a difference? Those are the questions we take with us into the next act. The pause in the action, the turn inward via interiority, gives readers a chance to reflect on the purpose of what Cosby is showing us. What is he telling us about what it means to be human?

In the final act, Cosby continues to use the scene–sequel pattern to pull us, faster and faster, to the final climax. In chapter 23, we get another read of how Roman has evolved when he, with seemingly few qualms, brings along BBB thugs to torture the owner of a local construction company into agreeing to sell him a 51 percent share of his business. Cosby chooses to give us this scene from the POV of the business owner, rather than Roman, so we can see that, from the outside, this character we’ve come to know quite well looks and sounds no better than Torrent and Tranquil. This is a savvy craft choice. By this point in the novel, we know and empathize with Roman. We’ve seen why he’s made the choices he has. We don’t see him as a pure villain like Torrent or Tranquil, drunk on power and violence. But the POV shift makes us worry that he might be on that same path, even if he believes his motives are pure.

As part of the sequel to this episode, we get our next glimpse of that day in June 2003—by the end of the scene, Roman and Dante are on their way to confront their mother, who Dante saw having an affair, and we know the ultimate outcome, even if we don’t yet know the how or why. Cosby has reversed the pattern of Act 2, with the inward and backward focused material taking a back seat to the external, plot-focused material. But it’s here to remind us of how damaged Roman is, to warn us that perhaps we don’t yet know quite how damaged he is.

There are two more spikes of violence (the rival Ghost Town Crew gang marauding through a bar, Torrent killing three of his own gang members in front of Roman, and Roman and Neveah narrowly surviving a drive-by shooting), followed by quieter sequels, which focus on developing Dante and Neveah, showing us the ways in which their mother’s death has shaped and warped Roman’s siblings.

Now, let’s look at how Cosby stitches everything together in the final five chapters of the novel. Cosby starts this final sequence by giving us one last backstory chapter, in which we see Roman and Dante confront their mother. She slaps Roman, he holds her arms, Dante intervenes, and then their mother falls when Roman releases her, dying after hitting her head. Their father arrives and tells them, “This is ours. We have to bear this. No one else,” before feeding her into the crematorium’s oven. In this scene, the omniscient narrator draws us in by the use of “you” and “we”:

The narrator universalizes the siblings’ experience before particularizing it again: Roman and Dante, however, “never get to cross that valley from idolatry to understanding,” and now we understand fully why Dante is so lost, why Roman’s moral compass gyrates so wildly.

In chapter 32, the tension climbs as Roman puts his final chess pieces in place, orchestrating a fictitious meeting between the BBB and GTC gangs, with Chauncey present as informant. At the same time, we see Neveah and Dante spiraling toward choices neither of them fully understand. Now, take a glance back at the graph above to see the tidy parallelogram of the last three chapters, with their perfect balance of internal and external tension. Let’s look at how Cosby gradually modulates the intensity as he moves us from climax to resolution.

Chapter 33 delivers the climax of the frontstory gangster plot: Roman pulls off a complex power-play that provides multiple surprise twists for the reader and leaves him in control of the BBB. He himself pulls the trigger and kills Torrent, thinking of his father telling him “To be a king, you have to think like one. You have to do king shit.” What he doesn’t know is that Dante has gone out to find the leader of the GTC and has been killed. Roman is undone by the news. Neveah reacts by trashing their kitchen, in the process discovering her mother’s cremains. This chapter has the highest level of both internal and external intensity.

The next chapter takes the intensity down just a little, keeping the internal intensity at the highest notch but letting the external intensity fall one notch. Roman returns to the family home, where Neveah tells him their father is also dead. We understand, as Roman does, that Neveah killed their father, blaming him for their mother’s death. Roman finally, after all these years, tells her the truth about their mother’s death and pleads for her to stay, but she leaves, telling him, “I have nothing. We are nothing.” This chapter resolves finally the backstory plot and gives a final, painful answer to the frontstory question we started with: “Will Roman be able to keep his family safe?”

Then, finally, in the epilogue, which takes place a few weeks later, we see both the internal and external intensity at equilibrium once more, perhaps poised on the brink of another story. Roman is in the crematorium, firmly in control of the BBB and comfortable enough with violence that he doesn’t flinch when he lifts the head of Ernesto Salaazar, who killed Dante, out of a cremation box. He’s also comfortable wielding power and issuing threats in a way that would have seemed out of character for him in chapter 1. Note how far away he is now from the character we saw at the end of Act 1, repeating to himself, “This is not who you are.” Remember, too, the omniscient narrator who warned of the crossed Rubicon, the cast die, the events set in motion on that June day in 2003? In the context of the flashback, we believe the narrator is referring to the death of Roman’s mother. Now, in the epilogue, we see that Roman is still living out the consequences of that day.

In the final paragraphs of the novel, we shift POVs to Jae, who has fallen in love with Roman, who may be carrying his child, who sees all of him. Will Roman be able to keep this new family safe? Will he lose himself in the process or is he already lost? We’ll have to wait for a sequel to find out. The shape and intensity of the last three chapters take us from climax to resolution to reverberating questions as we try to look forward into the world Cosby has created. If we look back at the shape of the novel we just read, we can trace Roman’s character arc as a tragic hero, one who began as a flawed but morally legible protagonist and may now be ending as an empathetic but morally flawed villain.