It doesn't start with an explosion, but with a return. In Blacktop Wasteland, the new novel by S. A. Cosby, Roman Carruthers returns to Jefferson Run, the city he left behind, to save the family business and, unknowingly, to face everything he never resolved. It's a classic move in American literature, yes, but Cosby takes it to a darker place: that of emotional inheritance, guilt, and violence as a legacy.
The symbolic heart of the novel is a crematorium, a setting as unusual as it is deeply coherent with the author's universe. Cosby didn't choose it randomly. "I worked in the funeral service here in America. I was just an assistant, but I've been surrounded by all of that, whatever you want to call it." From there arises a fascination that is both poetic and narrative: "It's not just destruction, but change and recovery". Fire also functions as a criminal tool, but above all, as a moral measure: "I wanted to show how far the protagonist, Roman, is willing to go to save his family."
Roman is perhaps Cosby's most deceptive protagonist. He is not physically imposing, does not fit the "tough guy" archetype of his previous novels. "I wanted to write a character who was successful, intelligent, driven," explains the author. Roman is someone who has succeeded materially but is "broken inside". The emptiness has a clear origin: "His mother disappeared when he was a teenager, and there is a huge sense of guilt, loss, and pain that he tries to fill by making as much money as he can." Ambition here is not an escape route, but another form of denial.
This unresolved pain runs through the entire novel and manifests in the impossibility of escaping his hometown. "It's a hard place to leave, but even harder to leave behind," says Cosby. Returning implies facing a traumatic childhood, a family reputation marked by suspicion, and secrets that no one has been able to name. The tragedy does not stem from a major mistake but from an accumulation of silences.
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As in much of his work, Cosby focuses on masculinity and its relationship with emotional silence. "Especially in American society, you are forced to be strong, tough, not to show weakness," he states. The result is a generation of men unable to verbalize pain: "They weren't bad men, they weren't bad people, but they didn't have the tools to articulate how they felt, so sometimes they just acted." Against them, the character of Neveah embodies another possibility: that of naming the conflict and holding the family together when everything threatens to fall apart.
Violence, in that context, is never ornamental. "I always try to make violence matter," insists Cosby. It is not gratuitous or spectacular, but a consequence of extreme moral decisions. In Blacktop Wasteland, each violent act pushes Roman further away from himself, turning the novel into a modern tragedy. "This has been the first book that didn't make me feel triumphant at the end," he confesses. "The last 30 pages are probably the hardest I've ever written in my life".
"Confederate nostalgia is nonsense. The South didn't rebel to fight for their freedom, but because they didn't want to give up their slaves"
This pessimism connects with a critical view of contemporary United States. Jefferson Run is not just a setting, but "the physical manifestation of the lie of the American dream". A real city, explains Cosby, destroyed by deindustrialization, where the promise that effort guarantees a dignified life is revealed as false. "The America you imagine exists only for some people", he emphasizes. Gentrification, institutional abandonment, and violence appear as symptoms of the same fracture.
Cosby writes from the South and against its mythification, amid a tumultuous context for the United States. "It's nonsense," he says about Confederate nostalgia. "The South didn't rebel because they were fighting for freedom. The South rebelled because they didn't want to give up their slaves". As a Black Southern writer, he claims the right to portray that territory without sugarcoating it: "This place belongs to us as much as anyone else."
International recognition - from Stephen King to Barack Obama - has not altered his compass. "It's just surreal," he says. For someone who grew up in poverty, that support is a source of pride, not complacency. All he seeks, he says, is for his stories to be liked. Nor does he take for granted his reception outside the United States. In Spain, where he has published before but is still an author to be discovered by the general public, Cosby is curious and cautious: "I'm always surprised when someone outside the US picks up my books."
What he is clear about is what he wants to leave in those who read him. Ultimately, Blacktop Wasteland does not work without a basic conviction: the problem is not the absence of love, but the inability to express it. "You can love someone, love your family, but if you don't communicate with them, it's a lost love", he summarizes. An elemental, uncomfortable, and devastating truth, as basic as it is complicated.