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During the late night of the 7th of April 1990, a devastating fire erupted aboard the MS Scandinavian Star, a passenger ferry traveling between Frederikshavn and Oslo. Inadequate crew training along with malfunctioning safety doors aided the propagation of the flames, while deadly cyanide gas emitted from burning laminates caused the loss of 159 people. Initially, the disaster 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 defend himself, the full truth about the disaster remained hidden for many years. Only in 2020 that a comprehensive documentary revealed the fire was likely set deliberately as part of an fraud scheme.

Nordenhof's Scandinavian Star Sequence: A Glimpse

Within the initial book of Asta Olivia Nordenhof's Scandinavian Star series, the preceding volume, an unnamed narrator is riding on a public transport through the Danish capital when she notices an older man on the street. As the bus moves away, she experiences an “eerie sense” that she is taking a piece of him with her. Driven to retrace the route in pursuit of him, the character finds herself in a setting that is both unfamiliar and deeply familiar. She introduces readers to Maggie and Kurt, whose connection is tested by the pressures of their troubled pasts. In the final pages of that book, it is suggested that the source of Kurt's discontent may stem from a disastrous financial decision made on his account by a man known as T.

The Devil Book: An Unconventional Narrative Style

This second installment opens with an lengthy poetic passage in which the narrator explains her challenge to write T's story. “In this second volume,” she writes, “we were supposed / to follow him / from childhood up until / the night / when he sat anticipating for / the news that / the fire / on the ferry / had effectively been / ignited.” Overwhelmed by the undertaking she has set herself and disrupted by the global health crisis, she tackles the tale indirectly, as a form of allegory. “I came to think / that I / can do / anything I want / so this / is my work / this is / for you / this is / an erotic thriller / about entrepreneurs and / the dark force.”

A tale gradually emerges of a female character who spends quarantine in London with a virtual stranger and during those weeks relates to him what happened to her a ten years before, when she agreed to an proposal from a figure who professed to be the evil entity to fulfill all her desires, so long as she didn't doubt his intentions. As the threads of the two stories become more interwoven, we begin to believe that they are one and the same—or at the very least that the nature of T is multiple, for there are demonic forces all around.

Another blaze is present: a passionate, magnetic dedication to literature as a form of activism

Deals with the Devil: A Thematic Exploration

Classic stories instruct us that it is the dark figure who does bargains, not God, and that we engage in them at our risk. But what if the narrator herself is the malevolent force? A additional storyline comes finally to light—the story of a young woman whose childhood was scarred by abuse and who was placed in a mental health facility, under duress to comply with social expectations or endure more of the same. “[The devil] understands that in the game you've created for it, there are a pair of results: submit or remain a beast.” A third way out is ultimately unveiled through a collection of poems to the darkness that are also a call to arms against the forces of capital.

Parallels and Interpretations: From Fiction to Real Events

Many UK readers of the author's series novels will reflect immediately of the Grenfell Tower fire, which, though unintentional in origin, bears similarities in that the resulting tragedy and loss of life can be attributed at in part to the dangerous trade-off of putting financial gain over people. In these initial volumes of what is planned to be a seven-book series, the blaze on board the ferry and the chain of deceptive business deals that ended in mass murder are a sinister background element, revealing themselves only in fleeting flashes of detail or inference yet casting a deepening shadow over all that transpires. Certain readers may question how much it is possible to interpret The Devil Book as a independent work, when its aim and meaning are so intricately bound into a broader whole whose final form, at present, is uncertain.

Innovative Prose: Ethics and Aesthetics Fused

There will be others—and I count myself as among them—who will become enamored with the author's project purely as text, as properly experimental literature whose ethical and artistic intent are so profoundly interlinked as to make them inextricable. “Write poems / for we need / that too.” Another kind of blaze exists: an intense, magnetic devotion to writing as a political act. I intend to persist to pursue this series, wherever it leads.