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In the early hours of the 7th of April 1990, a devastating fire erupted on board the MS Scandinavian Star, a car and passenger ferry traveling between Oslo and Frederikshavn. Insufficient crew training combined with jammed fire doors accelerated the propagation of the flames, while toxic hydrogen cyanide gas released from burning laminates caused the loss of 159 people. Initially, the tragedy was attributed to a passenger—a lorry driver with a record of arson. Given that this individual also perished in the fire and was unable to refute himself, the complete truth regarding the event remained concealed for a long time. It wasn't until 2020 that a detailed documentary disclosed the fire was likely set deliberately as part of an insurance fraud.

Asta Olivia Nordenhof's Scandinavian Star Series: A Glimpse

In the first volume of Nordenhof's Scandinavian Star sequence, the preceding volume, an unidentified protagonist is traveling on a public transport through Copenhagen when she notices an elderly man on the sidewalk. As the vehicle drives away, she feels an “uncanny feeling” that she is taking a part of him with her. Driven to retrace the journey in search of him, the narrator finds herself in a setting that is both alien and strangely known. She introduces readers to Maggie and Kurt, whose relationship is strained by the pressures of their troubled histories. In the final pages of that book, it is implied that the root of the character's discontent may stem from a poor investment made on his behalf by a individual known as T.

This New Volume: A Unique Narrative Style

The Devil Book opens with an lengthy poetic passage in which the writer describes her struggle to write T's story. “Within this volume, two,” she states, “we were supposed / to follow him / from youth up until / the night / when he sat anticipating for / the news that / the blaze / on the Scandinavian Star / had effectively been / ignited.” Burdened by the undertaking she has set herself and disrupted by the global health crisis, she tackles the story obliquely, as a type of allegory. “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 narrative gradually emerges of a female character who spends quarantine in the UK capital with a near-unknown person and during those days tells to him what happened to her a ten years before, when she agreed to an offer from a man who professed to be the evil entity to fulfill all her wishes, so long as she didn't question his motives. As the threads of the dual narratives become more interwoven, we begin to believe that they are one and the same—or at the very least that the identity of T is multiple, for there are devils everywhere.

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

Pacts and Consequences: A Thematic Exploration

Classic stories instruct us that it is the dark figure who does bargains, not God, and that we enter into them at our risk. But suppose the narrator herself is the devil? A additional storyline comes finally to light—the account of a young woman whose childhood was marred by mistreatment and who spent time in a mental health facility, under duress to comply with social expectations or endure more of the same. “[The devil] knows that in the scenario you've created for it, there are two results: surrender or stay a monster.” A third way out is finally unveiled through a series of poems to the night that are also a rallying cry against the forces of capital.

Connections and Readings: From Fiction to Real Events

Many British readers of the author's Scandinavian Star novels will think right away of the Grenfell Tower fire, which, though accidental in cause, shares similarities in that the resulting disaster and loss of life can be linked at least partly to the devil's bargain of putting profit over human lives. In these initial books of what is planned to be a multi-volume sequence, the fire on board the ferry and the series of deceptive business deals that ended in multiple deaths are a sinister background presence, revealing themselves only in fleeting flashes of detail or inference yet projecting a deepening influence over all that transpires. Certain individuals may question how far it is feasible to read The Devil Book as a stand-alone piece, when its aim and significance are so deeply tied into a broader whole whose final form, at this stage, is uncertain.

Innovative Prose: Ethics and Aesthetics Fused

There will be others—and I count myself as among them—who will fall in love with the author's project purely as text, as properly experimental literature whose moral and creative purpose are so profoundly entwined as to make them inextricable. “Write poems / for we require / that too.” Another kind of blaze exists: an intense, magnetic devotion to the craft as a statement. I will continue to pursue this series, no matter where it leads.