SA Cosby's King of Ashes starts with a call to the hero's journey – or does it?

King of Ashes is S.A. 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 drag 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 looks like 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 a series of short scenes that efficiently introduce us to Roman’s external and internal worlds, establish the themes of the novel, and deliver the inciting incident that starts Roman on his journey.

Cosby opens with a dream sequence, 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. Let’s look at the passage and see how Cosby avoids those problems.

Cosby keeps the passage short, just over a hundred words, and he offers specific, almost cinematic detail. Importantly, those details spark curiosity, especially the watch (which I’ll say more about in the next section) and the drops of blood. Is the blood a patient’s or her own? Cosby has embedded a story question in the dream sequence: What happened to Roman’s mother on “that day”?

This story question 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 later 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 six that I think is the true inciting incident of the novel. (I break that chapter down in detail in my scene study.)

If you include a dream sequence anywhere in your manuscript, and especially in your opening, evaluate it by asking these questions: Is it doing more than one job? Does it plant a story question readers will be genuinely curious about? Could it be half as long? Is there another way to deliver this information? The answers will tell you whether to cut it or revise it.

Now, let’s return to the detail of that twelve-thousand-dollar watch. Cosby’s 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. He met her at a party for his rapper client Lil Glock 9 the night before, and he has to struggle for a moment to remember her name. The exterior details seem to draw a picture of a man focused on image and wealth rather than relationships.

But the dream sequence has already taught us that there is something else going on beneath the surface—this character lost his mother at sixteen, perhaps violently, and he still dreams of her. Cosby builds on that gap between image and reality as the scene progresses. 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.” He does own that twelve-thousand-dollar watch, but he purchased it secondhand.

The gap is another example of dramatic irony. Like the example we saw in my scene study of The God of the Woods, when Louise lies to T.J., the dramatic irony here works to ally readers more closely to the protagonist because we already know a deeper, more complex version of him than the woman in the scene does.

Building a gap between surface appearance and internal truth for a character is a powerful strategy for adding complexity. The gap can also strengthen your character’s arc if they must close it before the end of the novel. Here are some questions to explore if you want to use this technique:

Cosby waits to deliver the inciting incident until after the dream sequence and the character introduction—after readers know about the story question involving the mother and the gap between Roman’s external and internal selves. In this case, the inciting incident is a phone call from Roman’s sister, informing him that their father is in a coma after an accident and summoning him home to Virginia. If this is the inciting incident, what is the hero’s journey going to be? What quest is Roman accepting? In his conversation with his assistant about rescheduling upcoming meetings, Roman tells her he’s going home “[l]ong enough to make sure my daddy isn’t going to die.” But that’s a hope, not a quest, and readers suspect the quest will somehow involve the question about what happened to his mother.

What Cosby reveals next confirms that suspicion—and gives us an even deeper look inside this character. Before his flight, Roman makes an appointment with a dominatrix, whom he visits monthly to receive “what he craved in the deepest, darkest caverns of his heart. Penance. Punishment. Absolution.” What has Roman done that requires punishment, we wonder?

We won’t get that answer until the end of the novel, but this scene confirms it has something to do with his mother’s disappearance:

Crucially, the hero’s journey Roman wants to undertake is impossible—his mother is already gone, and he can’t change that fact.

Finally, in the last scene, Roman begins his literal journey; he’s on the plane, but flying toward a quest we don’t yet understand. Cosby takes advantage of that feeling of momentum to give us one more passage that makes us wonder exactly what kind of journey he is beginning and how it will end. 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.” What kind of hero’s journey is possible in a world governed by these assumptions?

What Cosby is doing in this opening, and in the novel as a whole, demonstrates how you can build an entire novel around flipping or subverting a popular story structure. He’s dropping hints right here in the opening, but this is a novel that richly repays rereading. Once we know where Roman’s journey takes him, we can see that some part of him knew where he was headed all along.

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