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In the early hours of April 7 1990, a devastating blaze broke out aboard the MS Scandinavian Star, a passenger ferry operating between Oslo and Frederikshavn. Insufficient crew preparedness along with jammed fire doors accelerated the propagation of the flames, while toxic cyanide gas emitted from burning laminates caused the deaths of 159 individuals. Initially, the tragedy was blamed to a traveler—a truck driver with a record of fire-setting. Since this suspect too died in the incident and was unable to defend the accusations, the full facts regarding the disaster stayed concealed for many years. It wasn't until 2020 that a comprehensive investigation disclosed the fire was likely started intentionally as part of an insurance fraud.

Nordenhof's Scandinavian Star Sequence: An Overview

Within the first volume of Asta Olivia Nordenhof's Scandinavian Star sequence, the preceding volume, an unnamed narrator is riding on a bus through the Danish capital when she notices an older man on the street. As the vehicle moves away, she feels an “eerie sense” that she is carrying a piece of him with her. Driven to repeat the journey in search of him, the character finds herself in a landscape that is both unfamiliar and deeply familiar. She introduces readers to a couple named Maggie and Kurt, whose relationship is strained by the pressures of their conflicted histories. In the final pages of that book, it is implied that the source of Kurt's disaffection may stem from a poor investment made on his behalf by a individual known as T.

The Devil Book: An Unconventional Narrative Style

This second installment opens with an lengthy poetic passage in which the writer explains her struggle to compose T's narrative. “In this volume, two,” she states, “we were supposed / to trace him / from childhood up until / the night / when he sat anticipating for / the news that / the blaze / on the Scandinavian Star / had effectively been / set.” Burdened by the task she has assigned herself and derailed by the global health crisis, she approaches the tale obliquely, as a type of parable. “I came to think / that I / can do / anything I want / so this / is my book / this is / for you / this is / an sensational story / about businessmen and / the dark force.”

A tale slowly emerges of a woman who experiences quarantine in London with a virtual stranger and over the course of those weeks tells to him what happened to her a decade earlier, when she agreed to an offer from a figure who claimed to be the evil entity to grant all her desires, so long as she didn't doubt his intentions. As the elements of the dual narratives become more intertwined, we start to believe that they are identical—or at the very least that the nature of T is legion, for there are demonic forces all around.

Another blaze is present: an ardent, magnetic commitment to literature as a political act

Pacts and Consequences: A Thematic Exploration

Classic stories instruct us that it is the devil who does bargains, not a divine being, and that we engage in them at our peril. But suppose the narrator herself is the devil? A third storyline comes finally to light—the story of a girl whose childhood was marred by mistreatment and who spent time in a psychiatric hospital, under pressure to conform with social expectations or endure further harm. “[This entity] understands that in the scenario you've created for it, there are a pair of outcomes: submit or stay a monster.” A alternative path is ultimately revealed through a series of poems to the darkness that are also a call to arms against the influences of capital.

Connections and Readings: From Literature to Reality

Many UK audience members of Nordenhof's series books will reflect right away of the London tower tragedy, which, though accidental in cause, bears parallels in that the ensuing disaster and fatalities can be attributed at in part to the dangerous trade-off of putting financial gain over human lives. In these first two books of what is planned to be a seven-book series, the blaze aboard the ferry and the chain of deceptive transactions that ended in multiple deaths are a ominous underlying presence, showing themselves only in brief glimpses of detail or inference yet casting a growing influence over everything that occurs. Some readers may doubt how much it is possible to read The Devil Book as a stand-alone work, when its aim and significance are so intricately bound into a larger narrative whose ultimate shape, at this stage, is uncertain.

Experimental Writing: Ethics and Aesthetics Intertwined

Some individuals—and I count myself as one of them—who will fall in love with Nordenhof's endeavor purely as text, as properly innovative literature whose ethical and artistic purpose are so profoundly entwined as to make them inextricable. “Compose verses / for we require / that as well.” There is another fire here: a passionate, magnetic commitment to writing as a statement. I will continue to pursue this literary journey, no matter where it goes.