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During the early hours of the 7th of April 1990, a catastrophic fire erupted aboard the ferry Scandinavian Star, a car and passenger ferry traveling between Frederikshavn and Oslo. Insufficient crew preparedness combined with jammed fire doors aided the spread of the fire, while toxic cyanide gas released from combusting materials caused the deaths of 159 individuals. Initially, the tragedy was attributed to a traveler—a truck driver with a record of fire-setting. Since this individual too perished in the incident and was not able to refute himself, the complete truth regarding the event remained concealed for many years. It wasn't until 2020 that a detailed documentary disclosed the blaze was likely started deliberately as part of an insurance fraud.

Asta Olivia Nordenhof's Scandinavian Star Series: An Overview

In the first volume of Asta Olivia Nordenhof's epic sequence, the preceding volume, an unidentified narrator is traveling on a public transport through Copenhagen when she notices an older man on the street. As the bus drives away, she feels an “uncanny feeling” that she is taking a part of him with her. Driven to retrace the route in pursuit of him, the character enters a setting that is both alien and strangely known. She introduces readers to Maggie and Kurt, whose connection is tested by the burdens of their troubled pasts. In the concluding section of that volume, it is implied that the source of the character's discontent may stem from a disastrous investment made on his account by a man known as T.

This New Volume: An Unconventional Narrative Style

The Devil Book begins with an lengthy prose poem in which the writer describes her struggle to compose T's story. “In this second volume,” she states, “we were meant / to trace him / from youth up until / the night / when he sat waiting for / the report that / the fire / on the Scandinavian Star / had effectively been / set.” Burdened by the task she has set herself and disrupted by the global health crisis, 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 sensational story / about businessmen and / the dark force.”

A tale gradually unfolds of a female character who spends lockdown in the UK capital with a near-unknown person and over the course of those days relates to him what happened to her a ten years earlier, when she agreed to an proposal from a man who claimed to be the devil to grant all her desires, so long as she didn't doubt his intentions. As the threads of the dual narratives become more interwoven, we begin to suspect that they are identical—or at minimum that the identity of T is legion, for there are devils everywhere.

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

Deals with the Devil: A Thematic Examination

Classic stories teach 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 devil? A additional storyline eventually emerges—the story of a young woman whose early years was marred by abuse and who was placed in a mental health facility, under pressure to comply with social expectations or suffer further harm. “[This entity] knows that in the scenario you've created for it, there are two results: surrender or remain a monster.” A alternative path is finally unveiled through a collection of poems to the night that are also a call to arms against the forces of wealth and power.

Parallels and Interpretations: From Fiction to Real Events

Numerous UK audience members of Nordenhof's Scandinavian Star books will think immediately of the London tower tragedy, which, though accidental in origin, shares parallels in that the ensuing disaster and fatalities can be linked at least partly to the dangerous trade-off of prioritizing profit over human lives. In these first two books of what is projected to be a multi-volume series, the blaze on board the ship and the series of fraudulent transactions that ended in mass murder are a ominous background element, showing themselves only in brief flashes of information or inference yet casting a growing influence over all that occurs. Some readers may doubt how much it is possible to read The Devil Book as a stand-alone piece, when its purpose and meaning are so intricately bound into a broader whole whose ultimate shape, at present, is uncertain.

Innovative Prose: Ethics and Aesthetics Intertwined

There will be others—and I include myself as one of them—who will become enamored with the author's endeavor purely as written art, as properly innovative literature whose moral and creative purpose are so deeply entwined as to make them inextricable. “Compose verses / for we need / that as well.” There is another fire here: an intense, magnetic devotion to the craft as a political act. I intend to persist to follow this series, wherever it leads.