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In the late night of April 7 1990, a devastating fire broke out on board the ferry Scandinavian Star, a passenger ferry traveling between Oslo and Frederikshavn. Inadequate crew training combined with jammed fire doors aided the spread of the flames, while toxic cyanide gas released from combusting materials led to the deaths of 159 people. At first, the disaster was blamed to a passenger—a truck driver with a history of arson. Since this suspect too died in the incident and was unable to defend himself, the complete facts regarding the disaster remained hidden for a long time. Only in 2020 that a detailed documentary disclosed the fire was likely set intentionally as part of an insurance fraud.

Asta Olivia Nordenhof's Literary Sequence: A Glimpse

In the initial book of Asta Olivia Nordenhof's Scandinavian Star series, Money to Burn, an unidentified protagonist is riding on a bus through Copenhagen when she notices an older man on the street. As the vehicle moves away, she experiences an “eerie sense” that she is carrying a piece of him with her. Compelled to retrace the journey in search of him, the character finds herself in a landscape that is both unfamiliar and deeply familiar. She introduces readers to a couple named Maggie and Kurt, whose connection is tested by the burdens of their conflicted pasts. In the final pages of that volume, it is suggested that the source of Kurt's discontent may stem from a disastrous investment made on his behalf by a individual known as T.

This New Volume: An Unconventional Narrative Style

This second installment begins with an lengthy poetic passage in which the narrator describes her struggle to write T's narrative. “In this volume, two,” she writes, “we were meant / to follow him / from youth up until / the evening / when he sat waiting for / the news that / the fire / on the Scandinavian Star / had successfully been / set.” Burdened by the undertaking she has assigned herself and disrupted by the pandemic, she approaches the tale obliquely, as a type of parable. “I came to think / that I / can do / whatever I want / so this / is my work / this is / for you / this is / an erotic thriller / about businessmen and / the dark force.”

A narrative gradually emerges of a female character who spends quarantine in the UK capital with a near-unknown person and during those weeks relates to him what happened 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 threads of the dual narratives become more interwoven, we begin to suspect that they are identical—or at the very least that the nature of T is multiple, for there are devils all around.

Another blaze is present: an ardent, compelling dedication to writing as a form of activism

Deals with the Devil: A Literary Examination

Literature instruct us that it is the dark figure who makes bargains, not God, and that we enter into them at our risk. But suppose the narrator herself is the malevolent force? A third narrative eventually emerges—the story of a girl whose childhood was marred by mistreatment and who spent time in a psychiatric hospital, under pressure to comply with societal norms or suffer more of the same. “[The devil] knows that in the game you've set for it, there are a pair of results: surrender or stay a monster.” A third way out is ultimately revealed through a series of poems to the darkness that are simultaneously a rallying cry against the influences of capital.

Connections and Readings: From Fiction to Reality

Many British readers of the author's Scandinavian Star books will reflect right away of the Grenfell Tower fire, which, though unintentional in cause, shares similarities in that the ensuing disaster and fatalities can be attributed at least partly to the devil's bargain of putting profit over people. In these first two books of what is projected to be a seven-book sequence, the fire on board the ship and the chain of fraudulent business deals that culminated in multiple deaths are a sinister underlying element, showing themselves only in fleeting flashes of detail or implication yet casting a growing shadow over everything that transpires. Certain readers may question how much it is possible to interpret The Devil Book as a independent piece, when its aim and meaning are so deeply bound into a broader whole whose ultimate shape, at this stage, is unknowable.

Experimental Writing: Art and Morality Fused

Some individuals—and I include myself as one of them—who will fall in love with the author's project purely as text, as truly innovative writing whose ethical and creative purpose are so profoundly interlinked as to make them inseparable. “Compose verses / for we require / that as well.” There is another fire here: an intense, attractive commitment to writing as a statement. I intend to persist to pursue this series, wherever it leads.