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During the early hours of the 7th of April 1990, a devastating blaze erupted aboard the ferry Scandinavian Star, a passenger ferry operating between Frederikshavn and Oslo. Inadequate crew training along with malfunctioning safety doors aided the spread of the fire, while deadly hydrogen cyanide gas emitted from combusting laminates caused the loss of 159 individuals. Initially, the disaster was blamed to a traveler—a truck driver with a history of arson. Given that this individual also perished in the incident and was unable to defend himself, the full truth regarding the event stayed hidden for a long time. Only in 2020 that a detailed investigation disclosed the blaze was likely set deliberately as part of an fraud scheme.

Asta Olivia Nordenhof's Literary Sequence: A Glimpse

In the first volume of Nordenhof's Scandinavian Star sequence, the preceding volume, an unidentified protagonist is riding on a bus through the Danish capital when she notices an elderly man on the sidewalk. As the vehicle drives away, she feels an “eerie sense” that she is taking a part of him with her. Compelled to repeat the route in search of him, the character enters a setting that is both unfamiliar and strangely known. She presents readers to a couple named Maggie and Kurt, whose connection is strained by the pressures of their troubled pasts. In the final pages of that book, it is implied that the source of Kurt's disaffection may originate in a disastrous financial decision made on his behalf by a individual known as T.

This New Volume: An Unconventional Approach

The Devil Book begins with an extended poetic passage in which the writer explains her challenge to compose T's story. “In this volume, two,” she writes, “we were meant / to trace him / from youth up until / the night / when he sat anticipating for / the report that / the blaze / on the Scandinavian Star / had successfully been / set.” Overwhelmed by the task she has set herself and disrupted by the pandemic, she tackles the story obliquely, as a type 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 narrative slowly emerges of a female character who spends lockdown in the UK capital with a near-unknown person and during those days tells to him what occurred to her a ten years earlier, when she accepted an offer from a figure who claimed 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 intertwined, we start to believe that they are one and the same—or at minimum that the identity of T is legion, for there are devils all around.

Another blaze is present: an ardent, magnetic commitment to literature as a form of activism

Pacts and Consequences: A Literary Exploration

Literature instruct us that it is the dark figure 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 storyline eventually emerges—the story of a girl whose early years was scarred by abuse and who was placed in a psychiatric hospital, under duress to comply with societal norms or suffer more of the same. “[The devil] understands that in the game you've set for it, there are two outcomes: surrender or stay a monster.” A alternative path is finally unveiled through a series of verses to the darkness that are also a call to arms against the influences of wealth and power.

Parallels and Readings: From Fiction to Reality

Many UK audience members of the author's Scandinavian Star books will reflect immediately of the Grenfell Tower tragedy, which, though unintentional in cause, bears parallels in that the resulting disaster and fatalities can be linked at in part to the dangerous trade-off of putting profit over people. In these initial volumes of what is projected to be a seven-book series, the fire aboard the ship and the series of fraudulent business deals that culminated in multiple deaths are a ominous background presence, revealing themselves only in brief glimpses of information or inference yet casting a growing influence over all that transpires. Some individuals may doubt how much it is feasible to interpret this volume as a stand-alone piece, when its purpose and significance are so deeply bound into a broader narrative whose ultimate shape, at this stage, is unknowable.

Experimental Writing: Art and Morality Fused

There will be others—and I count myself as among them—who will become enamored with the author's endeavor purely as written art, as properly experimental literature whose ethical and artistic purpose are so deeply entwined as to make them inseparable. “Write poems / for we need / that too.” Another kind of blaze exists: a passionate, magnetic devotion to the craft as a political act. I intend to continue to pursue this series, no matter where it goes.