Managing internal and external intensity in King of Ashes by S.A. Cosby

This post discusses the entire plot of King of Ashes, including the ending.

S.A. Cosby’s King of Ashes is taut, propulsive crime fiction as well as a nuanced, moving portrait of a “tragic hero,” to use Cosby’s own description of his protagonist. Crime fiction is a subset of the thriller genre, which prizes action and pacing. In this novel, Cosby keeps the thriller intensity but layers it over a thematically rich character study. Studying how he balances the two will be useful for writers who want to add intensity to a quieter plot or for writers who want to add more depth to an action-focused plot.

To study intensity, I track what I’ve come to think of as the “pulse” of the novel, ranking the external and internal intensity of every scene or chapter. External intensity is what’s happening in the plot: action, dialogue, anything that could be filmed. Internal intensity is what’s happening inside the point-of-view character: interiority, backstory memories, the tension between what they have and what they want.

Let’s now look at the graph showing the intensity—the pulse—of King of Ashes.

Notice how spiky it is, with frequent high-intensity scenes, especially toward the end. This is characteristic of a thriller; we’ll see other intensity graphs in this series that have different shapes and patterns. Cosby hooks readers with two high-intensity spikes in the opening chapters, then lowers the external temperature to turn inward and backward. The final chapters deliver periodic spikes of external intensity before pausing once more to let internal intensity carry the momentum, building tension as we approach the climactic finale. 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.

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 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.

In act one, the external and internal intensity mostly move together, with two spikes of action (chapters six and nine) to draw readers in. Those high-intensity spikes are showy and dramatic, but the dips that come after them do important work that is sometimes less apparent.

I analyzed chapter six in detail in my scene study and also introduced Jack Bickham’s concept of “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, chapter seven is the sequel beat that follows chapter six’s scene, in which Roman loses his teeth, his brother Dante loses a finger, and Roman makes a “bargain with the devil” to keep them both alive. Chapter seven opens in a dentist’s office where Roman is 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. Roman’s teeth aren’t just teeth, we learn via a chunk of interiority. The expensive veneers that were knocked out and the even more expensive implants that will replace them are markers of wealth and class, signals Roman needs to send to his wealth management clients—and himself—that he is “one of them.”

In this same scene, we also see Roman evaluating another aspect of his identity. He admits that he had underestimated Tranquil and Torrent, but he also believes they are now underestimating him:

Cosby is foreshadowing Roman’s entire arc here. We don’t know precisely what he’s going to do next, but we know he isn’t going to fold or flee. This passage modulates into backstory, as Roman remembers the toughness of “the Skids,” the neighborhood he grew up in—and the toughness of his parents when a kid knocked out one of his teeth with a beer bottle and his father told him only that he needed to learn to look after himself.

Later in the same chapter, Cosby tackles the theme of identity from a different angle. Roman’s sister Neveah is thinking through her affair with a married policeman: “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.” Placed early in the novel, a passage like this establishes character and theme markers we can use as a measuring stick going forward. Where are these characters on a spectrum from good to evil? Will this distinction between action and identity hold?

In chapter nine, that last spike of intensity you see in act one, 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. King of Ashes is full of best bad choices—moments when a character is forced to choose the most palatable from among an array of terrible options—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 crematory’s oven and must now kill Cassidy, Getty’s girlfriend, whom Dante has been having an affair with. Dante refuses this particular choice, killing one of the BBB henchmen instead.

Chapter ten is the sequel to this scene. The brothers regroup as best they can, cremating the bodies of Getty and the gang member Dante killed. Cosby also uses this sequel to set up a future scene. Roman has to work hard to persuade the naïve Cassidy that she needs to go into hiding, that if Tranquil and Torrent find out she’s alive, they will all be killed. In one quiet moment tucked into a dialogue tag, Cosby shows us another hint of what Roman might be capable of. Roman reassures Cassidy he never intended to kill and cremate her, “and in his soul he thought he meant it.” The slippery phrasing here hints to an alert reader that, deep down, he would have done it if he had to.

At the end of the chapter, in the final paragraphs of what I’ve identified as act one of the novel, we see Roman circling back to the distinction between action and identity Neveah wrestled with earlier in the chapter:

As we’ll see in acts two and three, Roman has already moved farther away from these lines in the sand than he yet knows.

As you are planning, writing, and revising, pay special attention to the pages that follow your highest-intensity material and look for ways to apply the sequel technique. These are not only pacing breaks for the reader, but also places where you can set up the next action and deepen your novel through attention to character and theme. Here are a few moves to consider for those sequel moments.

As you can see from the intensity graph, the shape of act two is very different from act one; 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 backward and inward 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. Cosby also delivers the first flashback chapter in this act, 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 combination of the omniscient narrator and the shifting tenses adds weight to the backstory. It’s a technique to consider if your manuscript includes a pivotal backstory moment. But it’s a technique to use sparingly; the impact wears off through too much repetition.

In the final act, Cosby continues to use the scene–sequel pattern to pull us, faster and faster, to the final climax. Across this final stretch, most chapters run at or near peak intensity—external, internal, or both.

In the very first scene of this act (chapter twenty-three), we see how far Roman has evolved. With seemingly few qualms, he brings BBB thugs to torture the owner of a local construction company until he agrees to sell him a 51 percent stake in the 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 the backstory day in June 2003—by the end of the scene, Roman and Dante are on their way to confront their mother, whom 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 two, 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 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, carefully calibrating the external and internal intensities to give readers the full impact of his devastating ending. 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 crematory’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 thirty-two, 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 understands.

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 thirty-three 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, 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 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?

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 crematory, firmly in control of the BBB and comfortable enough with violence that he doesn’t flinch when he lifts the head of the man 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 one. He’s no longer telling himself, as he did at the end of act one, “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 happens to be the sister of Torrent and Tranquil. She has fallen in love with Roman and may be carrying his child. 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.

Get new craft breakdowns like these right in your inbox, plus sentence studies, craft tips, and book reviews.