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During the late night of April 7 1990, a devastating blaze broke out aboard the ferry Scandinavian Star, a car and passenger ferry operating between Frederikshavn and Oslo. Insufficient crew training combined with jammed safety doors accelerated the propagation of the fire, while toxic hydrogen cyanide gas emitted from combusting materials led to the loss of 159 individuals. Initially, the tragedy was blamed to a traveler—a truck driver with a record of arson. Since this suspect too died in the incident and was not able to refute himself, the complete truth about the event remained concealed for many years. Only in 2020 that a comprehensive documentary disclosed the blaze was likely set intentionally as part of an fraud scheme.

Nordenhof's Literary Sequence: An Overview

Within the initial book of Asta Olivia Nordenhof's epic sequence, the preceding volume, an unnamed narrator is traveling on a bus through the Danish capital when she observes an older man on the street. As the bus moves away, she experiences an “uncanny feeling” that she is carrying a piece of him with her. Driven to retrace the route in pursuit of him, the narrator enters a setting that is both unfamiliar and deeply familiar. She presents readers to Maggie and Kurt, whose relationship is strained by the burdens of their troubled pasts. In the concluding section of that volume, it is implied that the source of Kurt's disaffection may stem from a poor financial decision made on his behalf by a individual known as T.

The Devil Book: A Unique Approach

The Devil Book begins with an lengthy prose poem in which the writer explains her challenge to write T's narrative. “Within this second volume,” she writes, “we were meant / to trace him / from childhood up until / the evening / when he sat waiting for / the report that / the fire / on the Scandinavian Star / had successfully been / ignited.” Overwhelmed by the task she has assigned herself and disrupted by the pandemic, she approaches the story 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 sensational story / about entrepreneurs and / the dark force.”

A tale gradually emerges of a female character who spends lockdown in London with a near-unknown person and during those weeks relates to him what occurred to her a decade before, when she accepted an offer from a figure who professed to be the evil entity to grant all her desires, 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 identical—or at minimum that the identity of T is multiple, for there are demonic forces all around.

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

Pacts and Consequences: A Literary Exploration

Classic stories instruct us that it is the devil 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 eventually emerges—the story of a girl whose early years was marred by mistreatment and who was placed in a mental health facility, under pressure to conform with societal norms or suffer more of the same. “[This entity] knows that in the scenario you've set for it, there are a pair of outcomes: submit or stay a beast.” A third way out is ultimately revealed through a series of poems to the darkness that are simultaneously a call to arms against the influences of capital.

Connections and Interpretations: From Literature to Real Events

Numerous UK audience members of the author's Scandinavian Star books will think immediately of the London tower fire, which, though unintentional in origin, shares parallels in that the resulting tragedy and loss of life can be linked at least partly to the devil's bargain of putting profit over human lives. In these initial volumes of what is projected to be a seven-book sequence, the blaze aboard the ship and the chain of deceptive transactions that culminated in multiple deaths are a ominous background presence, revealing themselves only in brief glimpses of detail or implication yet projecting a growing influence over all that transpires. Certain readers may doubt how far it is feasible to read this volume as a independent work, when its aim and meaning are so deeply bound into a larger narrative whose ultimate shape, at present, is uncertain.

Experimental Writing: Ethics and Aesthetics Fused

Some individuals—and I count myself as among them—who will become enamored with the author's project purely as written art, as properly innovative writing whose ethical and creative purpose are so profoundly interlinked as to make them inseparable. “Write poems / for we require / that too.” There is another fire here: an intense, attractive devotion to writing as a statement. I intend to continue to pursue this literary journey, no matter where it goes.