King of Ashes is SA Cosby’s fifth novel, and his third to hit the bestseller lists immediately upon publication. Compared to the opening of Cosby’s breakout hit, Blacktop Wasteland, which features a thrilling car race and pull-out-all-the stops writing, the opening of King of Ashes is slower, less immersive, even a little workmanlike at first glance. But it delivers the necessary first beats of what turns out to be a classic hero’s journey narrative—except this one pulls the protagonist, Roman Carruthers, back home and into his past.
Let’s walk through the first chapter and see how it works. The chapter is divided into four scenes that efficiently introduce us to Roman’s external and internal worlds, establish the themes of the novel, and deliver the first inciting incident that starts Roman on his journey.
Scene one opens with a dream sequence:
He dreams of his mother.
Her mahogany skin is deeper and darker in the sepia-tone filter that diffuses the cinematography of his dream. Her eyes, deep and wide, sparkle at him like fireflies. Her hair, cut short in the back and curly on the top, seems to glisten as well. She is wearing the nurse scrubs he last saw her in that day. The cuff of her left pants leg has minute drops of blood like an abstract henna tattoo.
In his dream he reaches out his hand, not the hand with the twelve-thousand-dollar watch but his sixteen-year-old self's hand. And before he can touch her, she fades away like an instant photo moving in reverse.
Opening with a dream is a choice I often advise writers to avoid—it’s somewhat clichéd and can feel static to readers scanning eagerly for plot, for something to happen. Cosby mitigates that somewhat by keeping the sequence very short and embedding a story question: What happened to Roman’s mother on “that day”? This turns out to be a central preoccupation of the novel, and the answer is key to the ending, which is a showstopper. I’ll say more about the ending in a future post, but I think the comparatively static opening scenes set the stage for later surprises—the creative and clever ending, but also a big narrative shift in chapter 6 that I think is the true inciting incident of the novel. (I’ll break that chapter down in detail in my next post on the novel.)
Note also that Cosby sneaks a character description detail into the dream sequence—that twelve-thousand-dollar watch. This first scene goes on to fill in the picture of a man with many of the trappings of success. Also waking up next to Roman is his latest one-night stand, whose name he struggles to remember for a moment. He met her at a party for his rapper client Lil Glock 9; we learn that Roman heads a wealth management firm in Atlanta, and that he is more cautious than his public image perhaps conveys: “Roman knew he had to present a certain persona as a money manager in one of the richest cities in America, but he didn’t intend to put himself in the poorhouse in service to that image.”
This gap between image and reality already introduces a bit of tension—we readers already know him better than the woman in the scene does. After this bit of stage setting, we get the phone call that sets Roman’s journey in motion: His sister informs him that their father is in a coma after an accident and summons him home to Virginia.
At this point, Cosby starts hopping around in time a bit, a smart move since readers are now eager for that homecoming, but he needs to first reveal a hidden aspect of Roman’s character and give us a glimpse at the themes of the novel. Scene two informs us that “his flight didn’t take off until 8:00 p.m.” (hold your horses, readers) and “he just had one more stop to make” first. That stop turns out to be an appointment with a dominatrix, Miss Delicate, whom Roman sees monthly, a place “where he was given what he craved in the deepest, darkest caverns of his heart. Penance. Punishment. Absolution.”
The bondage scene is focused on Roman’s internal state; we see only glimpses of it before Cosby cuts to a new scene in which Roman is getting dressed. What we really need to understand is that Roman feels guilty about his mother’s disappearance and, as Miss Delicate herself points out after their session, “You like to create situations where you need to be punished. Even if you have to punish yourself.” Cosby uses interiority to show us that Roman himself understands that dynamic: “It wasn't about sex. It was sexual, yes, but it wasn't sex. Sexuality was just the pen they used to write the story he needed to read again and again. The story where he stops his mother from leaving the house that day and vanishing without a trace. The folktale where he is the classical hero that stops his mother from disappearing like the morning dew in the light of the rising sun.” We can guess, even before we see it unfold in the following chapters, that Roman is going to be given another chance to be that hero. It’s too late to save his mother, but soon he will be called on to save someone else he loves.
Finally, the last scene gets Roman on the plane, flying quickly to the starting point of what we think is his hero’s journey. Cosby takes advantage of that feeling of momentum to ring one more theme gong (a classic resonant ending). Roman remembers a woman he’d dated for a time, a theoretical physicist who had come to believe that the universe wasn’t evil but indifferent. He thinks now that he disagrees with her: “The universe was both evil and indifferent. It was both horrific and idiotically apathetic. It was like a god that strode through time and space full of anger and bereft of concern.” In my notes on this passage, I wrote, “Does Roman think differently at the end? Do we?” As is often the case with a well-crafted novel, rereading is a richer experience than a first read because now that I know where Roman’s journey takes him, I can see that some part of him knew where he was headed all along.
If you've read the book, how did you experience the opening chapters?
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