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During the early hours of April 7 1990, a devastating blaze broke out aboard the MS Scandinavian Star, a passenger ferry traveling between Oslo and Frederikshavn. Inadequate crew preparedness along with malfunctioning safety doors accelerated the spread of the flames, while deadly cyanide gas released from combusting materials caused the loss of 159 people. Initially, the tragedy was attributed to a passenger—a truck driver with a history of fire-setting. Since this suspect also died in the incident and was unable to refute the accusations, the full truth regarding the event remained hidden for a long time. Only in 2020 that a detailed investigation revealed the fire was probably started deliberately as part of an insurance fraud.

Nordenhof's Literary Sequence: A Glimpse

In the first volume of Asta Olivia Nordenhof's Scandinavian Star series, Money to Burn, an unnamed protagonist is traveling on a bus through the Danish capital when she notices an elderly man on the sidewalk. As the bus moves away, she experiences an “uncanny feeling” that she is carrying a part of him with her. Compelled to retrace the route in search of him, the narrator finds herself in a landscape that is both alien and deeply familiar. She introduces us to a couple named Maggie and Kurt, whose connection is tested by the burdens of their conflicted pasts. In the concluding section of that book, it is suggested that the source of Kurt's discontent may originate in a poor investment made on his account by a man known as T.

This New Volume: An Unconventional Approach

The Devil Book opens with an lengthy prose poem in which the narrator explains her challenge to compose T's story. “Within this second volume,” she states, “we were meant / to follow him / from childhood up until / the evening / when he sat anticipating for / the news that / the blaze / on the Scandinavian Star / had effectively been / ignited.” Overwhelmed by the undertaking she has set herself and disrupted by the global health crisis, she tackles the tale obliquely, as a type of parable. “It occurred to me / that I / can do / whatever I want / so this / is my book / this is / for you / this is / an erotic thriller / about businessmen and / the devil.”

A tale slowly unfolds of a woman who spends lockdown in the UK capital with a virtual stranger and during those days relates to him what occurred to her a decade before, when she accepted an proposal from a figure who claimed to be the devil to grant all her desires, so long as she didn't question his intentions. As the threads of the two stories become more intertwined, we start to suspect that they are identical—or at minimum that the nature of T is legion, for there are demonic forces everywhere.

There is another fire here: a passionate, magnetic dedication to literature as a form of activism

Deals with the Devil: A Literary Examination

Literature instruct us that it is the devil who makes bargains, not God, and that we enter into them at our risk. But what if the narrator herself is the malevolent force? A additional narrative eventually emerges—the story of a young woman whose childhood was marred by abuse and who spent time in a mental health facility, under duress to comply with social expectations or suffer more of the same. “[This entity] knows that in the scenario you've created for it, there are two outcomes: submit or remain a monster.” A alternative path is ultimately unveiled through a collection of poems to the night that are also a call to arms against the forces of wealth and power.

Connections and Interpretations: From Fiction to Reality

Numerous British readers of the author's series novels will think immediately of the Grenfell Tower tragedy, which, though accidental in origin, bears similarities in that the ensuing disaster and loss of life can be attributed at least partly to the devil's bargain of putting profit over people. In these initial books of what is projected to be a multi-volume sequence, the fire on board the ship and the series of deceptive transactions that culminated in mass murder are a ominous background presence, revealing themselves only in fleeting glimpses of information or implication yet casting a growing influence over all that occurs. Some readers may doubt how far it is possible to read The Devil Book as a independent piece, when its aim and significance are so intricately tied into a larger narrative whose final form, at present, is uncertain.

Experimental Writing: Ethics and Aesthetics Fused

There will be others—and I include myself as one of them—who will become enamored with Nordenhof's project purely as written art, as truly innovative writing whose ethical and artistic intent are so profoundly interlinked as to make them inseparable. “Write poems / for we need / that too.” Another kind of blaze exists: a passionate, magnetic commitment to the craft as a statement. I intend to persist to pursue this series, wherever it leads.