I’ve been a fan of S.A. Cosby since I read All the Sinners Bleed a few years ago and gobbled down all of his work. He’s a unique writer with such a distinctive voice, and through the holds list at my library, I was finally able to get my hands on his latest, King of Ashes, which was published a year ago. I think that in itself is a testament to his popularity. His latest novel is about the downfall of a Southern family after their father, owner and founder of the family business Carruthers Crematorium, is left in a coma after his car is hit by a train.
The whole accident stinks of a setup, since his car was rammed onto the train tracks by a mysterious truck, and Roman Carruthers, the oldest son, is called back to his humble beginnings in Jefferson Run, Virginia. Roman escaped the little hamlet that’s now ridden with gang violence and is currently a rich money manager catering to celebrities and the elite of Atlanta. Besides Roman, there is his middle sister Neveah, who’s now the heart and soul of the family business, albeit reluctantly, and his younger brother Dante, who still lives at home, in a bedroom decorated in posters of rappers and superheroes.
Their father’s coma is just the latest family crisis; the family’s been marked by tragedy since the disappearance and probable death of their mother when they were kids. Roman was just sixteen and on the precipice of losing his virginity when his mother’s car was found on those same train tracks where his dad’s accident took place.
The recent trauma stirs up echoes from their past, and Neveah gets her hands on her mother’s old case files from the police, determined to find out what happened. The rumor in town is that Roman’s father, Keith, killed his wife after discovering that she was cheating on him with the crematorium assistant, and then he burned her remains in one of the business’s ovens so there was no evidence of the crime.
All three of the Carruthers siblings struggle to reconcile with the past while dealing with the family patriarch in a vegetative state, unlikely to ever wake up and function again. At the same time, a very different kind of family exists in Jefferson Run—gangs—and Roman learns that his brother Dante, the ne’er-do-well, has crossed the most fearsome gang in Jefferson Run and they’ve put out a hit on Dante. The Black Baron Boys are led by twin brothers Torrent and Tranquil, who are known for their cruelty. Dante tells Roman about a man who crossed the brothers, then was killed and had his guts turned to food, which was delivered to his baby mama by a driver pretending to be from DoorDash. She ended up eating the food, only to find out she’d scarfed her lover.
Roman now knows who’s responsible for his father’s accident, and he loves his family fiercely and will do anything to protect those who are left. This particular novel hit me really hard since I’m dealing with the downfall of my father, similar to Keith Carruthers lying in a vegetative state. My dad has Alzheimer’s and has been slowly going downhill since about 2018, but now the disease has accelerated and finally got to the point where my mother can’t take care of him. He had to go into a nursing home a month and a half ago, something we tried to prevent for as long as possible, and the guilt is shattering. The details Cosby puts into his novel about the Carruthers dealing with their dying father’s health insurance and eventually moving him into a nursing home are a salve on my soul, making me feel a little bit less alone:
“Are the doctors giving up on him? Is that it? Are you giving up on him?” Roman asked.
“I’m not giving up, I’m thinking of myself, for once. It’s been over a month. His insurance is about to run out. The doctors don’t think he’s going to come out of it. I can’t work myself into an early grave to keep paying for these hospital bills.”
“I can give you money,” Roman said.
“Rome, I love you, but I don’t think I want the money that you’re making nowadays. This is the right thing to do. For him and for us. Are you gonna take him home? Wipe his ass? Change his feeding tube? Because that’s what’s in his future. I’m not trying to be gross, I’m trying to be real,” Neveah said.
“I’ll do anything for him. I’ll move goddamn heaven and earth for him. But that’s not the problem here. We’re a family. When it comes to Pop, we should all talk about this. He … deserves better,” Roman said.
Reading can be therapy, and I definitely felt that with this novel. Cosby knows what he’s writing about since he had to drop out of college in order to move home and take care of his sick mother, according to the Los Angeles Times. He said, “I was also a primary caregiver for my mother.”
Roman wonders about what his dad’s legacy will be and wrestles with ideas of mortality and how he, too, will be perceived in the future. How do you deal with a family secret? Compartmentalize, I guess. That secret is stuck in a special box that doesn’t get paraded around much, but all the Carruthers siblings carry the scars. Neveah dates a married man who treats her like shit, as if she believes this is what she deserves in the world. Roman has a sexual kink, and when tension builds up in him before an important meeting, he hires a professional to get the beating he needs for release. Dante struggles with drugs and alcohol, though he has a silver tongue when it comes to the ladies.
This mortal coil—what’s it all for? So much repetition—bad decisions repeated again and again. On the one hand, we have the Carruthers family who started out hardscrabble until their father got the loan for the crematorium, which became their livelihood, launching them out of poverty. Their father worked there around the clock with his wife assisting once she finished her shifts at the hospital. He was so single-minded that he neglected his wife so she sought affection with others. We see that same determination in Roman—again to make money, just like his father, though he’s traded corpses for shell companies. Then we have the gang family also blinded by greed, adopting young boys to carry out all their evil deeds and ruling by fear.
The ending is bleak, but it feels true and is so Southern gothic, reminding me of Faulkner.
I’m not sure how long I’ll have to wait for the next S.A. Cosby book, but I think I’ll be somewhat satiated since Barack and Michelle Obama’s production company with Netflix has developed Cosby’s All the Sinners Bleed into a nine-episode series that’s rumored to premiere later in 2026 or early 2027. (Please let it be 2026!)
