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During the late night of April 7 1990, a devastating blaze erupted aboard the ferry Scandinavian Star, a passenger ferry traveling between Oslo and Frederikshavn. Insufficient staff preparedness combined with malfunctioning fire doors accelerated the spread of the fire, while toxic hydrogen cyanide gas emitted from burning laminates caused the deaths of 159 individuals. At first, the disaster was attributed to a passenger—a truck driver with a record of fire-setting. Since this suspect also perished in the incident and was unable to defend the accusations, the full facts regarding the disaster stayed hidden for a long time. It wasn't until 2020 that a comprehensive investigation disclosed the fire was probably started intentionally as part of an fraud scheme.

Asta Olivia Nordenhof's Scandinavian Star Sequence: A Glimpse

Within the initial book of Asta Olivia Nordenhof's epic sequence, Money to Burn, an unnamed narrator is riding on a bus through the Danish capital when she observes an elderly man on the street. As the vehicle moves away, she feels an “eerie sense” that she is taking a piece of him with her. Compelled to retrace the route in search of him, the narrator enters a setting that is both unfamiliar and deeply familiar. She presents readers to a couple named Maggie and Kurt, whose connection is strained by the pressures of their troubled pasts. In the concluding section of that volume, it is suggested that the root of the character's discontent may originate in a disastrous financial decision made on his behalf by a man known as T.

This New Volume: A Unique Narrative Style

The Devil Book begins with an extended prose poem in which the writer explains her struggle to compose T's narrative. “Within this second volume,” she writes, “we were supposed / to follow him / from childhood up until / the night / when he sat anticipating for / the report that / the fire / on the ferry / had successfully been / set.” Burdened by the undertaking she has set herself and disrupted by the pandemic, she approaches the story indirectly, as a form of parable. “I came to think / 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 dark force.”

A tale gradually unfolds of a female character who experiences lockdown in London with a virtual stranger and during those days relates to him what occurred to her a ten years before, when she agreed to an proposal from a man who professed to be the evil entity to grant all her wishes, so long as she didn't doubt his intentions. As the elements of the two stories become more interwoven, we start to believe that they are one and the same—or at the very least that the identity of T is multiple, for there are demonic forces everywhere.

Another blaze is present: an ardent, compelling dedication to writing as a political act

Pacts and Consequences: A Literary Examination

Literature instruct us that it is the devil who does bargains, not God, and that we engage in them at our risk. But suppose the protagonist herself is the malevolent force? A third narrative eventually emerges—the account of a young woman whose childhood was scarred by abuse and who spent time in a psychiatric hospital, under pressure to comply with social expectations or suffer further harm. “[The devil] knows that in the scenario you've created for it, there are two results: submit or stay a monster.” A alternative path is finally revealed through a series of poems to the night that are simultaneously a rallying cry against the forces of capital.

Parallels and Interpretations: From Fiction to Reality

Many UK readers of the author's Scandinavian Star books will reflect right away of the London tower fire, which, though unintentional in cause, bears parallels in that the resulting disaster and fatalities can be attributed at in part to the devil's bargain of prioritizing profit over people. In these first two volumes of what is projected to be a multi-volume series, the blaze on board the ship and the series of fraudulent transactions that culminated in multiple deaths are a ominous background element, showing themselves only in fleeting glimpses of detail or inference yet casting a deepening influence over all that transpires. Certain individuals may question how far it is possible to read The Devil Book as a stand-alone work, when its aim and significance are so deeply bound into a broader whole whose ultimate shape, at this stage, is unknowable.

Innovative Prose: Ethics and Aesthetics Intertwined

There will be others—and I include myself as among them—who will fall in love with Nordenhof's project purely as written art, as truly experimental literature whose moral and creative purpose are so deeply entwined as to make them inextricable. “Write poems / for we require / that as well.” There is another fire here: a passionate, attractive commitment to the craft as a political act. I will continue to pursue this series, no matter where it leads.