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During the early hours of the 7th of April 1990, a devastating fire broke out aboard the ferry Scandinavian Star, a car and passenger ferry operating between Oslo and Frederikshavn. Insufficient crew training combined with jammed fire doors accelerated the propagation of the flames, while toxic cyanide gas released from combusting laminates caused the loss of 159 people. Initially, the tragedy was blamed to a passenger—a lorry driver with a history of fire-setting. Given that this individual too perished in the fire and was unable to defend the accusations, the full truth regarding the disaster stayed concealed for many years. Only in 2020 that a detailed documentary disclosed the blaze was likely set intentionally as part of an insurance fraud.

Asta Olivia Nordenhof's Literary Sequence: A Glimpse

Within the first volume of Asta Olivia Nordenhof's Scandinavian Star series, Money to Burn, an unnamed protagonist is traveling on a public transport through Copenhagen when she notices an older man on the street. As the vehicle drives away, she experiences an “uncanny feeling” that she is taking a piece of him with her. Compelled to retrace the route in pursuit of him, the character finds herself in a setting that is both unfamiliar and deeply familiar. She presents us to a couple named Maggie and Kurt, whose relationship is strained by the pressures of their troubled pasts. In the final pages of that book, it is implied that the source of the character's disaffection may originate in a disastrous financial decision made on his behalf by a man known as T.

This New Volume: A Unique Approach

The Devil Book begins with an extended prose poem in which the writer describes her challenge to compose T's story. “In this second volume,” she writes, “we were meant / to follow him / from childhood up until / the evening / when he sat waiting for / the report that / the fire / on the ferry / had effectively been / set.” Burdened by the undertaking she has assigned herself and disrupted by the global health crisis, she tackles the tale indirectly, 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 sensational story / about entrepreneurs and / the dark force.”

A tale slowly unfolds of a female character who experiences lockdown in London with a virtual stranger and over the course of those weeks relates to him what occurred to her a decade before, when she agreed to an proposal from a man who claimed to be the devil to fulfill all her wishes, so long as she didn't doubt his motives. As the threads of the two stories become more intertwined, we start to suspect that they are one and the same—or at minimum that the identity of T is multiple, for there are demonic forces all around.

Another blaze is present: a passionate, compelling commitment to writing as a form of activism

Pacts and Consequences: A Literary Exploration

Literature teach us that it is the dark figure who does deals, not a divine being, and that we engage in them at our peril. 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 spent time in a psychiatric hospital, under pressure to comply with societal norms or suffer more of the same. “[This entity] understands that in the game you've created for it, there are two outcomes: submit or remain a beast.” A third way out is finally revealed through a series of poems to the darkness that are also a call to arms against the influences of wealth and power.

Connections and Interpretations: From Fiction to Real Events

Numerous UK readers of the author's series novels will reflect immediately of the Grenfell Tower tragedy, which, though accidental in origin, bears similarities in that the resulting disaster and loss of life can be linked at least partly to the dangerous trade-off of putting financial gain over people. In these first two books of what is planned to be a multi-volume sequence, the fire on board the ship and the series of deceptive transactions that ended in mass murder are a sinister background presence, revealing themselves only in fleeting flashes of information or implication yet projecting a deepening shadow over everything that transpires. Certain individuals may doubt how far it is possible to interpret The Devil Book as a stand-alone work, when its purpose and meaning are so intricately bound into a larger narrative whose ultimate shape, at this stage, is uncertain.

Experimental Writing: Art and Morality Intertwined

There will be others—and I include myself as among them—who will become enamored with the author's endeavor purely as text, as truly experimental writing whose moral and creative intent are so deeply entwined as to make them inextricable. “Write poems / for we need / that too.” There is another fire here: a passionate, magnetic commitment to writing as a statement. I intend to persist to follow this series, wherever it leads.