SOUTHERN CULTURE ON THE SKIDS: S.A. COSBY'S KING OF ASHES

In King of Ashes, S.A. Cosby has created his darkest novel, which is saying something. Violence and despair hanG in the air and can strike at any moment. Very little of it takes place in the daytime and those moments feel overcast.

Cosby returns to his themes of family, dealing with it more directly than he has before. Roman Carruthers, a talented financial advisor working in Atlanta is called back home to Jefferson Run, Virginia when his father gets involved in a hit and run that put him in a coma. He and his other two siblings, Neveah, who runs the family's crematorium, and his drug addict brother Dante live under the disappearance of their mother over two decades ago. Roman soon learns Dante's addiction could be the cause of the hit-and-run.

Dante and his cohort used up most of the supply for a drug deal and are into The Blood Baron Boys, one of the gangs that run Jefferson Run, lead by the sociopathic brothers, Torrent and Tranquil, for $300,000. Roman arranges a sit down , believing he can negotiate where Roman will pay what he can up front, get the rest later, and until then use use financial services to increase their profits. Torrent and Tranquil teach them, in one of the most brutal passages I've read, that they want all the money. They're willing to try out Roman's financial brain, but the real service they want is the crematorium for their rivals.

Roman and Dante get in way too deep, forced to take a "better him than us" philosophy. To get out from unter Torrent and Tranquil. Ramon calls in Kahlil, a "security expert" who he shares mutual clients with. They form and execute a plan to destroy The Blood Baron Brothers from within. Much like Michael Corleone, Roman;s attempt to save his family puts him in further risk of losing it, especially as the mystery of his mother threatens to come to light.

Cosby takes the idea of family and extends it into community. The Carruthers, one of the better known and better off families in Jefferson Run, are something of town patriarchs. That said, the gangsters have as much if not more pull in town than they do. Both are in decay, rotting from past darkness seeping in. escape from it only compromises you. As Roman's father says about the family business, "Everything burns.:"

S.A. Cosby refuses to compromise, On a more focused and human scale, he examines the argument James Ellroy makes that we can't mourn for our innocence lost, since it was never there. By the end of King Of Ashes, few have their lives and no one has their souls.