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

As I mentioned in my post on the first chapter of King of Ashes by S.A. Cosby, I think the true inciting incident of the novel (the moment where the story actually starts) 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 that 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.

But first, 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. Here are the first several sentences of the chapter: 

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

Roman is at the door, there to help Neveah at the crematorium as he’d promised the day before. We stay in Neveah’s point of view as we get oriented to the crematorium 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 by getting 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 the first character’s last moment of interiority from the second character’s first moment of interiority with 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 and/or jump forward in time. We see Cosby do exactly this in the brief scene at the end of the day when Neveah is leaving the crematorium and gets a text message from the man she’s having an affair with, before Cosby returns to Roman, who carries the POV through the remainder of the chapter. (See writer Emma Darwin on this technique and other ways to shift POV.)

Before we look at the rest of the chapter, let’s take a quick look at the stats:

As we’ve seen in previous scene breakdowns, while the ‘live’ components of dialogue and action make up over half the chapter, Cosby still makes liberal use of interiority in order to guide our reactions as readers. 

The final sequence of the chapter, which is where we see the true inciting incident of the story, illustrates this beautifully. 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 also 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.”

Despite these words, Roman does indeed feel a stab of fear when he hears the cars pull up outside: “His deeper brain, his animal self, begged him to run. Run from this place and perhaps even set it on fire before he fled.” His fear only increases when he sees the brothers: “Their faces had the same permanent scowl. It was like the metal handles of a cauldron that had slowly but surely melted infinitesimally over the years, only to become rigid again as it cooled. But Roman didn’t think these men ever cooled. Their wrath was an eternal flame. He could feel it coming off them like heat from a woodstove.” Throughout the novel, Cosby returns to flame, heat, smoke, and ash metaphors, often delivered via Roman’s interiority—a beautiful example of how title, metaphor, and theme can work together.

The final few pages of this scene are dominated by dialogue—an area in which Cosby is supremely skilled—as the conversation quickly spins out of Roman’s control. And then we get 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, took, struck, 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 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 delivers the sequel: Roman realizing that he has made a grave mistake: 

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:

That bit of interiority in the middle shows that Roman understands exactly what kind of deal he has made, and 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 illegal activity, will he ever be able to step back?

Cosby gives us only a moment to feel relief when Torrent accepts the offer before ending the chapter with another burst of violence, once again bracketing a moment of interiority that makes it resonate: 

The last few pages of the chapter are a master class in what an effective cause-and-effect chain looks like as one action leads to a reaction motivating a new action. It’s the moments of interiority that bind those links together; without them, these bursts of violence are 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 not insignificant 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. 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.” This chunk of backstory is inserted into the middle of the back and forth between Roman and Torrent, just a page or so before the explosion of violence.

Why locate it there? 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 and surprised as Roman is by the way the scene twists, and so he doesn’t want notes of tension and fear to have 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.