Get Lit Preview: S.A. Cosby on 'King of Ashes'

Summary

Podcast Summary: "Get Lit Preview: S.A. Cosby on 'King of Ashes'"

Podcast: All Of It with Alison Stewart, WNYC
Airdate: October 6, 2025
Featured Guest: S.A. Cosby (author, King of Ashes)
Host: Alison Stewart
Interviewer: Tiffany Hansen

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Main Theme & Purpose

In this episode, Alison Stewart previews the October "Get Lit with All Of It" book club selection: King of Ashes by bestselling crime novelist S.A. Cosby. The conversation, conducted by Tiffany Hansen, dives into the novel's setting, characters, and underlying themes, centering on family, the impact of place, money, guilt, and morality. Listeners gain insight into Cosby’s storytelling craft and what makes King of Ashes a compelling read, especially for those drawn to complex, morally driven thrillers.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Setting as Character: Jefferson Run, Virginia

• Depicted as a "town that in many ways their best days are behind them."
  • Once a manufacturing hub, now economically depressed and overtaken by crime.
  • S.A. Cosby observes:

    "Nature abhors a vacuum and so something has to fill it. And a lot of what goes on at Jefferson Run goes on because of the fact that it has been sort of forgotten and lost." (02:27)

How Place Acts on People

• The Home Town’s Grip:
  • Roman escapes; Nevaeh feels resigned; Dante is caught in denial and addiction.
  • Cosby notes the psychological weight of place:

    "That town really weighs on each character and sort of affects the decisions they make, which also affects the plot." (03:17)

The Pieces We Carry From Home

• Universal Relatability:
  • Discussion about how leaving home shapes identity; what’s kept and what’s shed.
  • Cosby reflects:

    "It’s very fascinating how you’re able to sort of compartmentalize those pieces in your new place...what are the things you have to let go and what are the things you have to sort of move on from?" (04:07)

Shaping the Protagonist: Roman Carruthers

• A Product of Hardship and Ambition:
  • Roman’s upbringing made him ambitious, and morally flexible.

  • "He feels like, well, there are rules that are meant to be bent, and there are rules that can be broken, because the only rule is that you win." (05:00)

Money, Guilt, and Family Ties

• The "Acidity of Money":
  • Money as a corrosive force, both relationally and personally.

  • "Money can sort of burn through relationships, burn through connections, the way money burns through us." (06:35)

• Family Guilt:
  • Complicated by absenteeism, abandonment, and shared anxieties around Dante’s fate.

  • "The themes of guilt are huge in the book. And not just guilt for something major, but for the minor parts, the things that we have as family members, this sort of interconnectivity that sometimes we have to apologize for or sometimes we don’t know we have to apologize for." (07:10)

Moral Boundaries and Redemptive Value

• How Dark is Too Dark?
  • The question of narrative peril and characters' moral compromises is essential.

  • "If the reader doesn’t believe everybody is on the line, that everybody is in danger...I had to push it and make it a little bit more dark, a little bit more intense, because I wanted you to really believe...anybody could get taken out at any time." (08:17)

• On Writing Violence and Morality:
  • Violence serves to reveal both strength and weakness in characters.

  • "Violence can be very expository...It can tell you a lot about a character and how strong a character is or how weak a character is." (08:57-09:22)

• Shifting Lines and Justification:

  "There aren’t really any lines. They’re just choices...He keeps telling himself, I’m doing this for my family. And that’s a noble cause, that’s a righteous cause, but do the ends really justify the means?" (10:30-10:59)

Testing Characters (and Readers)

• S.A. Cosby on Character Resilience:

  "I never wanted it to be gratuitous...the things they face are the test to see how they can handle it as a character. Because the part of the story is, I don’t want them to be the same at the end...as they were in the beginning." (11:37)

• On Making Readers Squirm:

  "If a reader tells me this book made me cry...but I couldn’t leave it alone. That’s a win. That’s a win for me." (12:06)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• S.A. Cosby:

  "Nature abhors a vacuum and so something has to fill it." (02:20)

• On Money’s Cost:

  "I wanted to talk about, as I call it in the book, the acidity of money..." (06:35)

• On Writing Violence:

  "For me, violence doesn’t have to be four or five pages. I think it’s more effective to just say what happens, put it out on the page, and then you can move on to the next thing." (09:01)

• On Gray Morality:

  "There aren’t really any lines, they’re just choices." (10:32)

• On Reader Impact:

  "If a reader tells me this book made me cry, I had to close it. I had to walk away from it, but I couldn’t leave it alone. That’s a win." (12:06)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [01:56] – Introduction to Jefferson Run and its economic decline
• [03:00] – Place as a character; how it shapes Roman, Nevaeh, and Dante
• [03:59] – The concept of taking your hometown with you
• [04:50] – Roman’s ambition and moral flexibility
• [06:28] – Exploring major themes: money, guilt, and family
• [08:03] – Deciding how far to push darkness and danger in the story
• [08:57] – The narrative function of violence and character development
• [10:02] – On moral lines, character choices, and justification
• [11:24] – Testing characters’ and readers’ limits

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Final Thoughts

This episode offers a riveting look at the DNA of S.A. Cosby’s King of Ashes—its dark energy, the pull of place and family, and the friction between survival and morality. Cosby's commentary provides deeper layers to the storytelling, making this pod essential for club readers and podcast listeners drawn to contemporary Southern noir.

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To join the book club or RSVP for the live event with S.A. Cosby and YaYa Bey on October 28th, visit wnyc.org/getlit.

Transcript

[A]

You are listening to ALL of IT on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. Our October get lit with all of it book club selection is the new thriller King of Ashes from best selling author SA Cosby. The story follows the Carruthers family, owners of a small town crematory in Jefferson Run, Virginia, who suddenly find themselves in a world of trouble. The eldest sibling, Roman Carruthers, has fled his hometown. He's become a wealthy and successful financial advisor to Sea List celebrities and shady characters in Atlanta. Roman's sister Nevaeh has remained at home to help their dad with the crematory. Their youngest brother Dante, is aimless and has a drug problem. That addiction causes Dante to become indebted to a dangerous local gang. When Roman gets a call that his father has been in a car accident and is in a coma, he heads home to Jefferson Run. There he learns that his dad was targeted as a warning from the gang. Now he has to figure out how to save Dante and the rest of the family from gangsters hell bent on getting their money. Or else. New Yorkers can borrow their free copy to read along with us this month by heading to wnyc.org getlit that's also where you can grab tickets to our October 28th event with SA Cosby and musical guest Yaya Bae. Tickets are free. Head to wnyc.org getLit before they sell out. Now, to get you a little excited about reading the novel, here's a preview. Earlier this year, my colleague Tiffany Hansen spoke with SA Cosby. Here's part of that conversation.

[B]

Let's start by talking about this town where it is set, Jefferson Run, Virginia. How would you describe that town?

[C]

I would say Jefferson Run is a town that in many ways their best days are behind them. It's a form of manufacturing center. And a lot of towns in the south in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama were manufacturing towns. But in the 70s, you know, pulled up stakes, places where textile factories closed, where manufacturing, metal and iron factories close. And so Jefferson Run is a town just like that. And so in that space, when manufacturing moves out, sort of crime comes in. Nature abhors a vacuum and so something has to fill it. And a lot of what goes on at Jefferson Run goes on because of the fact that it has been sort of forgotten and lost. And so the manufacturing, the economic stability of the town is gone. And so something else had to come in and replace it.

[B]

What about that place acts on the characters or makes them act in a certain way? Because I do think sometimes place is its Own character?

[C]

Yeah, definitely. The town and its sort of timber affects the characters in different ways. For Roman, it's a place that he wanted to escape, a place he wanted to get away from. And for Nevaeh, it's a place that she feels like she can't get away from, that she sort of accepted her fate. For Dante is the place that he wants to try to forget. He doesn't want to leave, but he doesn't want to remember all the harsh things that have happened there. And so that town really weighs on each character and sort of affects the decisions they make, which also affects the plot.

[B]

New York is full of a lot of people who left their hometown. Of course, there are a lot of New Yorkers for whom this is a hometown, and they end up leaving here and taking pieces of this place with them. But I think that notion of taking our hometown with us in bits and pieces, for good or bad, is something that a lot of people experience. And I'm wondering what is interesting to you about that in terms of how it shapes a person?

[C]

I think where you are raised, where you grew up, and what do you do when you leave that place? And like you said, the pieces you take with you, I think it's very fascinating how you're able to sort of compartmentalize those pieces in your new place. Whether you come from a small town, you moved to a city, what are the things that you learned in the small town that you can use in the city? And what are the things you have to let go and what are the things you have to sort of move on from? What are some of the things that maybe you're ashamed of? Is it your accent? Is it your clothes? Is it the type of food you eat? And do you sort of embrace that and meld that with your new home, or do you sort of hide that away? And all of that is telling a story about who you are as a character and who you are as a person.

[B]

Well, let's talk about that then, in reference to your character Roman, because he sort of falls in the camp of wanting to leave his past behind. How did his hometown shape him?

[C]

I think it made him someone who is incredibly ambitious, someone who has a certain type of moral flexibility, I think, for the job that he's done and the world that he finds himself in. I think he feels like, well, there are rules that are meant to be bent, and there are rules that can be broken, because the only rule is that you win. And he's a very ambitious character. I think that comes from coming From a town, a small town that was economically depressed, a town that was dangerous. And so I think for Roman, he sort of created the family fantasy life that he always wanted when he was a little boy.

[B]

Do you feel like you. You're driving around Atlanta, let's pretend. Do you feel like you could, like, find him there? Do you look for him?

[C]

I definitely could. I definitely could. I think there's a certain type of character, a certain type of person who goes to, like, in Atlanta, a New York City and Los Angeles, and who reinvests themselves in a new way in a way that is in many ways the hyper realized version of themselves. And I think you definitely can find people like that. You could definitely find people who come from a small town, and I think you could definitely talk to them for a few minutes and find themselves dropping right back into that cadence because you never leave it all behind.

[B]

There are other powerful motivators that you explore in this book. Guilt money. Do you think about those sort of meta influences on your characters, or is it just a case of you follow these people around for a while and then those. Those sort of themes kind of float to the top?

[C]

No, I think there are definitely themes with this book that I wanted to explore. I definitely wanted to talk about, as I call it in the book, the acidity of money, the. The way money can sort of burn through relationships, burn through connections, the way money burns through us. So I definitely wanted to talk about sort of aspect of that. There's a scene in the book where Roman talks about when you go in a room with rich people, they look at you like a show horse. They check your teeth and your feet. And that's something I've experienced. And as my career has gone on, I've been in rooms with people who were very wealthy, and you can sort of feel that sort of even subconscious judgment. And as a person who came from meager means, someone who grew up in poverty, I can definitely feel it. I'm aware of it. And so I think it's interesting to talk about it and how we navigate it. But also the themes of guilt are huge in the book. And not just guilt for something major, but for the minor parts, the things that we have as family members, this sort of interconnectivity that sometimes we have to apologize for or sometimes we don't know we have to apologize for. Like in the book, you know, the sister, Nevaeh, she feels very abandoned by Roman. Roman left. He went to college and created a new life for him in another city, and he left her to take care of both his father and their little brother. And so that animosity is sort of couched with this sort of also relief that he's finally home. And so those. And then, of course, the both of them, I think, are worried about Dante. So there's this sort of really, really fascinating sort of spiderweb of connections and feelings. But at the core of it, I think, for these three characters is sort of this love that they have for each other.

[B]

But it gets pretty dark, even for you.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

How do you decide how far to push things? What does the scene tell you that it requires when you're writing it?

[C]

I think if you're writing a story like this, you have to make the reader understand that everybody's in peril, because it won't work. This sort of tragic story, this sort of interconnected crime story, won't work if the reader doesn't believe everybody is on the line, that everybody is in danger. And so for me, for this particular, I had to push it and make it a little bit more dark, a little bit more intense, because I wanted you to really believe, oh, this. Anybody could get taken out at any time. And that creates a sense of dread that makes you be concerned about these characters and makes you sort of become a part of their team.

[B]

How does violence move a story forward?

[C]

I think violence can be very expository, whether the person meting out the violence and how they react, but also the person that's receiving it and how they react to it and how they deal with it. For me, violence doesn't have to be four or five pages, I think. I think it's easy, and I think it's more effective to just say what happens, put it out on the page, and then you can move on to the next thing. But it's the way those characters react to both, again, the meting out and the accepting of the violence, or the person that's the victim and the person that's the aggressor. I think it can tell you a lot about a character and how strong a character is or how weak a character is and how they deal with physical pain and how they're able to translate that to either, you know, emotional courage or does it make them fall apart? And so for me, violence is very telling on the character and who that.

[B]

I wonder, where's the line, though? Because at some point, it might cause your readers to give up on a character, give up on a storyline, to give up on someone's redemptive value. Where is that line?

[C]

I think the line is wherever the character feels that they've sacrificed their morals, wherever that character feels like they've done. They've done an unforgivable act. You know, there's a line in the book where Roman thinks about this. He thinks about. You know, there aren't really any lines. They're just choices. You know, there aren't any lines to cross. They're just choices that you're gonna make. And for me, the choice is necessitated around, am I creating a situation and relating a situation that is going to test this character and push them up to the line of their morality? Because if I feel like I'm pushing them over it, then I feel like I'm doing them an ill service as a writer. With Roman, though, the character. What was interesting with that was his own personal morality kept shifting. So me pushing the line as a character, he would just keep moving it. And then I realized at some point, he is becoming the thing that he's fighting, which I thought was fascinating. And how far can you justify that to yourself? Because he keeps telling himself, I'm doing this for my family. And that's a noble cause, that's a righteous cause, but do the ends really justify the means?

[B]

How much do you enjoy making your characters squirm and making you should, like, twirl your hands when you give that evil laugh, make your characters squirm and make your readers squirm.

[C]

I don't really want to make my characters squirm, but I do want to test them. I do want to see how much they can take. And there are characters that I have that I've created where they can't take a lot at all, and they fold rather quickly. And then there are other characters that end up being the protagonist who can take as much as I'm willing to dish out. But I never wanted to be gratuitous. I never wanted to feel that. I'm just doing it to put them through pain. The pain, the choices, the, you know, the things they face are the test to see how they can handle it as a character. Because the part of the story is, I don't want them to be the same at the end of the book as they were in the beginning of the book. And so for me, there is a line, there is a way that I want to put them through that. Well, as far as the readers, yeah, I want to make readers squirm. If a reader tells me this book made me cry, I had to close it. I had to walk away from it, but I couldn't leave it alone. That's a win. That's a win for me. So a win is a win.

[A]

That was Tiffany Hansen's conversation with author S.A. cosby about his new novel, King of Ashes. It's our October Get Lit with all of it book club selection. To borrow your E copy and get tickets to our October 28th get lit event, head to wnyc.org getlit that is wnyc.org getlit Coming up on the show tomorrow, two big shows. Art on Broadway tells the story of three pals whose friendship is thrown into chaos when one purchases a six figure piece of art that is simply a white square. Actor Bobby Cannavale joins us along as director Scott Ellis. And then a new musical, off Broadway, Mexican, uses hip hop to tell the true story of the underground railroad that ran south to Mexico instead of north to Canada. Will speak with the cast and the crew. I'm Alison Stewart. I appreciate you listening and I appreciate you. I will meet you back here tomorrow.

[D]

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[E]

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