55 pages • 1-hour read
King of Ashes
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Interludes 3-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of substance use, addiction, graphic violence, and death.
Interlude 3 Summary: “June 6, 2003: Evening—Into the Night Gone Black”
The narrative moves back in time to the day of Bonita’s disappearance. Filled with reluctance and trepidation, Roman and Dante go to the crematory and confront their mother about her affair. When she claims that Dante doesn’t know what he saw, Roman becomes wrathful and disillusioned. He denounces his mother’s infidelity, and she hits him for the first time in his life.
Bonita and Roman engage in a physical struggle, and Dante pushes his brother away. Bonita falls and strikes her head on a metal table. The boys remain with their mother’s body until Keith finds them. He sends his sons to the lobby and cremates his wife’s remains. Keith hugs his sons close and urges them to tell no one, even Neveah, what happened.
Chapter 32 Summary
The narrative returns to the present. Roman meets with Shade in Richmond. Upon his return, he’s furious to learn that Neveah has begun the process of transferring their father to a nursing home without discussing the matter with him and Dante. She points out that they don’t inform her about what they are doing, and she refuses to become her father’s long-term caretaker or sacrifice her personal well-being for the family any longer. Roman accepts her reasoning while maintaining that Keith didn’t kill Bonita and doesn’t deserve Neveah’s ire. Neveah plans to spend a few days at the winery.
When Roman gets home, he and Dante discuss Dante’s addiction and Roman’s deepening involvement with the BBB. Dante blames himself for Bonita’s death, but Roman seizes his throat and orders him never to speak of that tragedy again. Roman and Dante apologize to one another. Roman asks his brother to stay home and promises that he’s going to protect him.
Roman calls Chauncey and pretends that he is ready to turn on Torrent and Tranquil. He tells the detective that the Black Baron Boys and the Ghost Town Crew will meet to discuss a truce in a warehouse in the Skids that night, and Chauncey eagerly agrees to set up recording equipment at the location. Roman lures the BBB to the same warehouse by claiming that a member of the GTC tried to recruit him and said that Ernesto, the gang’s leader, would be at the warehouse that night.
Next, Roman goes to the crematory to retrieve his father’s gun. He prays to his mother’s spirit, asking her to help him protect his brother and sister.
Chapter 33 Summary
Dante visits his friend Tug, whose girlfriend Raynell is still in the hospital following the Ghost Town Crew’s attack on Candy’s. Dante borrows the man’s gun and thanks him for everything he’s done for him. After imbibing drugs and alcohol, Dante looks at an old photograph of his family, apologizes for failing Cassidy, and calls out a challenge to the Ghost Town Crew’s leader.
When Roman and the BBB arrive at the warehouse, Chauncey reveals that he told Torrent and Tranquil about his deal with Roman because he blames Neveah for the bitter divorce that he is now embroiled in. Torrent tells his men to kill Roman, but they turn on the gang leaders because Roman has made each of them wealthy.
Shade has already given Roman permission to kill the Gilchrist brothers, and Roman reminds Torrent and Tranquil that they brought this upon themselves by trying to kill him and his family. The gang members add the ways that their former leaders were cruel to them and their friends. Torrent tries to shield Tranquil, but both are fatally shot. As Torrent lays dying, Roman tells him that he won’t be mourned and shoots him in the face. On Roman’s signal, Khalil shoots Chauncey from a concealed location. Roman instructs the members of the BBB to help him dispose of the bodies and make sure that Torrent’s dogs go to good homes. In his thoughts, he sends a prayer of gratitude to his mother.
Roman returns home around midnight and sees that Dante is gone. Around 4 am, an official at the medical examiner’s office informs him that his brother is dead and asks him to identify the body. Neveah hurries home from the winery, and the devastated siblings hold each other close. At 6 am, Roman goes to Jae’s apartment and tells her that Dante was killed by the Ghost Town Crew. She embraces while he weeps inconsolably.
Meanwhile, Neveah becomes intoxicated and throws various fragile objects in her grief. When she smashes the teddy bear cookie jar, she discovers that it contains her mother’s ashes and her wedding ring.
Chapter 34 Summary
Roman spends two days with Jae and then returns home. Neveah tells him that their father died the night before of an abdominal aneurysm because “someone gave him some aspirin or something that fucked up his blood thinners” (328). In reality, Neveah gave Keith the aspirin, causing the aneurysm and his death, as revenge for her belief that he killed Bonita.
Neveah shows Roman their mother’s ashes and the wedding ring and demands that he admit that Keith murdered her. He explains that he knows their father didn’t kill their mother because he was there, and he tells her about the accident. Horrified at her brother for having a hand in their mother’s death and at herself for murdering Keith, Neveah runs from the house. Roman pleads for her to stay because they are the only family they have left. She tells him that they have nothing and leaves.
Interlude 4 Summary: “October 26: Night”
The narrative moves forward two weeks. Neveah has left town and is no longer involved in the family business or Roman’s life. At the crematory, Roman meets with the members of the BBB, who now answer to him. He plans to go to Atlanta briefly, but he and Khalil will return to reshape the gang to a more businesslike model. When one of the gang members asks if they should be worried about the Ghost Town Crew regrouping, Roman produces and then cremates the decapitated body of the GTC’s leader.
Jae is pregnant with Roman’s child and plans to marry him. She comes to the crematory because she is anxious about her brothers’ prolonged absence, but Roman assures her that they are all right and will return eventually. Roman promises her that he doesn’t work for Torrent and Tranquil anymore, but Jae realizes that he is now the BBB’s leader. As she looks at the man she loves surrounded by his followers, she’s reminded of Lucifer and his fallen angels.
Interlude 3-Interlude 4 Analysis
In the novel’s final section, Roman completes his descent into moral decay by assuming command of the Black Baron Boys. Socioeconomics play a key role in his plot to overthrow Torrent and Tranquil, developing the theme of The Socioeconomics of Moral Decay. The gang members turn on the Gilchrist Brothers because Roman makes them wealthy. Likewise, Torrent and Tranquil’s most powerful allies, Shade Sinclair and the mayor, don’t oppose the leadership change because Roman’s strategies ensure they make more money than they did from the gang’s previous operations. In multiple senses, Roman reaps what he sows. For much of the novel, he increases Torrent and Tranquil’s wealth, and he seizes control of the operation he’s built up at the end: “He has taken Torrent and Tranquil’s kingdom and made it his own. He will never work for anyone ever again” (331). Although Roman accomplishes his goals to gain wealth and vengeance, his moral decay makes this resolution not a triumph but rather an echo of “the defeat of Lucifer, who thought it was better to reign in hell than serve in heaven” (332).
The revelations about Bonita’s death in these chapters illuminate why her children are trapped in The Relentless Cycle of Guilt and Punishment. Both Roman and Dante blame themselves for her demise, but it manifests in each of their lives differently. Dante’s guilt manifests in his addiction and aimlessness: “You don’t know why I’m like this? It’s because of my original fuckup. The Prime Fuckup. The original sin. Say it. I know you think it. I know Pop does. Say it, Rome. Say it to my face. Say it’s my fault” (309). In contrast, Roman copes with his guilt by striving for success and by attempting to solve his siblings’ problems for them. In Interlude 3, the narrator observes that facing the source of his trauma could help Roman find “a modest dose of absolution, but he will never find that place as long as he lives” (304). This grim pronouncement aligns with the novel’s genre because bleak endings are customary for the genre. Similarly, sharing the truth with Neveah does not bring Roman catharsis or forgiveness but instead contributes to her decision to exit his life forever.
The Weight of Family Loyalty and Generational Trauma shapes the novel’s tragic conclusion. The Gilchrist brothers were raised within the Black Baron Boys by their father, and both their lives and deaths are inescapably bound to the gang. Despite their many vices, Torrent and Tranquil are loyal to one another to the last: “The Gilchrist brothers fell together, Torrent lying across his younger brother. Trying to protect him to the end” (321). Their fate also highlights the juxtaposition of the two families—in a bitter twist, the novel’s antagonists uphold family loyalty as an inviolable value, but the protagonist’s family falls apart. The last time that the two surviving Carruthers see each other, Roman and Neveah are each consumed with guilt for a parent’s death. The bonds of familial loyalty can’t hold the siblings together any longer because they’ve both betrayed their family, Roman through his lies and his hand in their mother’s death, and Neveah through patricide. Roman desperately wants to hold onto his relationship with his last biological family member to give meaning to all of his misdeeds and the sacrifices he has made in the name of family, but Neveah’s response is to renounce the weight of family loyalty entirely, telling Roman, “[W]e have nothing. I have nothing. We are nothing” (329). The novel’s bleak ending implies that Neveah will not be able to escape her trauma by fleeing Jefferson Run but will always carry the weight of “love blackened and blistered and turned to ashes” (331).
In the closing interlude, Cosby gives Roman a new family in the form of Jae and their unborn child, but rather than representing a fresh start for him, the revelation of Jae’s pregnancy implies that the characters will perpetuate the destructive patterns established in the story. Loyalty, the narrative indicates, will likely lead Jae to remain with Roman because she loves him “more than she’s loved any other man in her life” (332). Likewise, Roman seems doomed to descend even further into immorality to defend his new family, just as his efforts to protect his biological family drove him to corruption.
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