Point-of-view handoffs and interiority in King of Ashes by S.A. Cosby

As I mentioned in my post on the opening, I think the true inciting incident of King of Ashes is not the phone call summoning the protagonist, Roman Carruthers, home to the bedside of his gravely injured father that we see in the opening, but rather the incidents we see in chapter six. Chapters two through five of the novel all take place during a single night, when Roman finally arrives home, visits his father in the hospital, and reconnects with his siblings, Neveah and Dante.

By the end of chapter two, we think we understand the contours of the story we are reading: This is a double-pronged mystery focused on the suspicious circumstances of the accident that put Roman’s father into a coma, as well as the long-ago disappearance of Roman’s mother. And by the end of the first night, in chapter five, we think we are on the path of an answer to at least the first mystery. Dante confesses to Roman that he is in debt to a group of local gangsters, the Black Baron Boys, after a failed drug-dealing scheme; he believes their father’s “accident” may have been meant to warn him. Roman tells Dante to arrange a meeting with the gang, and we expect to see that meeting as chapter six opens.

Before we analyze the chapter, let’s take a quick look at the stats.

Dialogue, action, and setting create the live scene—the showing components that could be filmed—and account for half of the chapter. However, Cosby still makes liberal use of the telling tool of interiority to guide our reactions as readers. In this chapter, we’ll see it do three different jobs: orient us, intensify the action, and surprise us. Much later, in my scene study of The Favorites, we’ll see Layne Fargo do almost the reverse—build a high-suspense competition scene out of mostly interiority.

Before we get to the gang meeting we expect, Cosby surprises us by introducing a new point-of-view character—Roman’s sister, Neveah. This first scene is an excellent example of how to pull off a point-of-view handoff without a scene break, so let’s look at how Cosby manages it. We start the scene with action:

The “heard” in the first sentence is a good example of a place where a filter word (for example, saw, heard, smelled) should not be stripped out since it helps establish the point of view. The backstory material about her father, which shades into interiority, reinforces the point of view and gives us an efficient capsule character arc of Neveah’s life to this point.

Roman is at the door, there to help Neveah at the crematory as he’d promised the day before. We stay in Neveah’s point of view as we get oriented to the crematory as a setting; Cosby introduces the memorable term “slushies,” which was their father’s name for bodies on “the outer edges of putrescence.” We also learn that their father used to say that “Nobody ever complains about the scent of ashes,” but Neveah herself often feels like she can’t wash the “scent of burned flesh” from her hair and skin. The siblings discuss Dante’s drug use, which Neveah attributes to the trauma of their mother’s disappearance.

Neveah then exits the scene, leaving Roman behind. Once again, Cosby establishes point of view via a filter word, followed by interiority:

The words “Roman stared” signal that we are now viewing the scene from Roman’s perspective, confirmed a few sentences later when we get his internal thoughts about the crematory.

A few pointers if you want to try this kind of point-of-view handoff yourself: First, do a handoff only once per scene rather than bouncing back and forth between POVs, which will earn you the dreaded “head-hopping” label and, more importantly, risks disorienting readers. Second, separate character A’s last moment of interiority from character B’s first moment of interiority using live scene elements like dialogue and action—elements that both POV characters have access to. Third, choose the handoff technique rather than a scene break if you want to keep the second POV character in the same place and time. Use a scene break instead if you want to switch settings or jump forward in time.

The final sequence of the chapter, where we see the true inciting incident of the story, is the clearest case. The scene opens in a very ordinary fashion; Roman receives a UPS package just before Dante arrives at the crematory. Dante, sober but shaky, tries to convince Roman that he should be scared of these brothers, Torrent and Tranquil Gilchrist, but Roman dismisses his concerns: “They just gangsters. And gangsters are just CEOs who work the streets. I’ve dealt with CEOs and I’ve dealt with some doughboys before. I can speak their language. I can make this work.”

However, the encounter with the brothers, dominated by dialogue, quickly spins out of Roman’s control. And then we see what I think is the true inciting incident of the novel:

Roman’s dialogue line is interrupted by that blow, followed by a pause for interiority so the cobra strike simile can heighten the tension, and then a staccato burst of action verbs—writhe, grab, pull, take, strike, put—as the scene escalates to life-and-death stakes. Cosby slows again at this point, focusing on Roman’s sensory experiences: the taste of the gun oil, the feel of his teeth on metal, the sound of Dante’s yell, the sight of the brothers backlit and towering over him.

The pattern repeats: Roman is struck again, Cosby pauses again to convey the specific texture of Roman’s pain via interiority, before more action—this time Roman falling onto the floor, where he sees pieces of his own teeth “swimming among that crimson puddle” of his own blood. After this shocking image, Cosby swings back to interiority once more as Roman realizes he has made a grave mistake: these aren’t “the larger-than-life cartoon characters that passed themselves off as tough guys in sound booths in Atlanta” but rather “monsters, and they were eating him and his brother alive.”

It is this crucial moment of interiority that fuels the final twist of the scene; we readers need this insight to understand Roman’s next moves. When Torrent orders one of his minions to shoot Dante, Roman makes a promise to triple what his brother owes them and to let them use the crematory to “make your problems disappear.” A bit of interiority layered between these promises shows that Roman understands exactly what he’s doing: “He knew he was making a bargain with the devil, but this was his last card to play. Otherwise they were both dead and on their way to hell.” A whole new set of story and character questions open up before us: Will Roman deliver on his promises? And if he does, how will that change him? If he steps over the line into crime and violence, will he ever be able to step back?

The last few pages of the chapter are a master class in what Jack Bickham calls “scene and sequel”: an action is followed by a reaction, which then motivates a new action. (We’ll look more closely at scene and sequel in my post on the novel’s structure.) Cosby uses interiority to deliver the reactions. Roman’s realization that these men are monsters, his clear-eyed understanding of the deal he’s striking—these are the sequel beats that move the character from one action to the next. Without them, these bursts of violence would be all show and no force when it comes to the plot.

One last note on this chapter: I mentioned the UPS driver showing up ahead of Dante at the beginning of this final scene. It seems like a throwaway moment but one that is given a fair amount of page time. There are a few dialogue lines, some details about the package (“the shape and size of a large Bible”), several sentences of action, but no emotion or interiority from Roman to give the moment more texture. Instead, Cosby saves that context for later, inserting it in the middle of the back-and-forth between Roman and Torrent, just a page or so before the explosion of violence. It turns out that this package contains two hundred thousand dollars in cash, and Roman had “been checking his phone for alerts all day with his stomach twisting until he’d heard the doorbell chime.”

Why locate this revealing bit of interiority in this particular spot? Why not enliven the moment of the delivery itself with a taste of Roman’s relief at its arrival? Or why not show his worry over it even earlier in the day to stoke tension as he’s working alongside Neveah? The answer is that Cosby wants this burst of violence to be a shock. He wants readers to be just as shocked as Roman is by the way the scene twists, so he doesn’t want notes of tension and fear to put readers on alert for the danger to come. That’s a move he wants to save for much later in the novel, when he sends us up the long, tall roller coaster of suspense before pushing us over the edge.

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