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During the early hours of April 7 1990, a devastating blaze broke out on board the ferry Scandinavian Star, a car and passenger ferry traveling between Frederikshavn and Oslo. Insufficient crew preparedness along with jammed safety doors aided the propagation of the fire, while deadly cyanide gas released from combusting laminates led to the loss of 159 people. At first, the tragedy was attributed to a traveler—a lorry driver with a history of fire-setting. Given that this suspect also perished in the fire and was unable to refute the accusations, the complete truth regarding the disaster stayed hidden for a long time. Only in 2020 that a detailed investigation disclosed the fire was likely started intentionally as part of an fraud scheme.

Asta Olivia Nordenhof's Scandinavian Star Series: A Glimpse

Within the first volume of Nordenhof's Scandinavian Star sequence, Money to Burn, an unnamed protagonist is riding on a bus through the Danish capital when she notices an elderly man on the street. As the vehicle drives away, she experiences an “eerie sense” that she is taking a part of him with her. Driven to retrace the route in search of him, the character enters a setting that is both alien and strangely known. She introduces us to Maggie and Kurt, whose relationship is tested 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 originate in a disastrous financial decision made on his behalf by a man known as T.

The Devil Book: A Unique Approach

The Devil Book begins with an extended poetic passage in which the writer describes her struggle to write T's story. “In this second volume,” she states, “we were supposed / to trace him / from childhood up until / the evening / when he sat anticipating for / the news that / the blaze / on the Scandinavian Star / had successfully been / ignited.” Burdened by the undertaking she has assigned herself and disrupted by the global health crisis, she approaches the story indirectly, 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 sensational story / about businessmen and / the dark force.”

A tale gradually unfolds of a female character who spends quarantine in the UK capital with a virtual stranger and during those weeks tells to him what occurred to her a decade before, when she accepted an proposal from a man who claimed to be the evil entity to grant all her wishes, so long as she didn't question his intentions. As the threads of the two stories become more interwoven, we begin to suspect that they are identical—or at the very least that the identity of T is legion, for there are devils all around.

Another blaze is present: a passionate, magnetic commitment to literature as a political act

Pacts and Consequences: A Literary Exploration

Classic stories 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 protagonist herself is the malevolent force? A additional narrative comes finally to light—the story of a girl whose early years was marred by abuse and who spent time in a mental health facility, under duress to conform with social expectations or endure more of the same. “[This entity] understands that in the scenario you've set for it, there are a pair of outcomes: submit or stay a monster.” A third way out is finally revealed through a series of poems to the darkness that are simultaneously a call to arms against the influences of wealth and power.

Connections and Interpretations: From Fiction to Reality

Many UK readers of the author's Scandinavian Star novels will think immediately of the London tower fire, which, though accidental in origin, bears parallels in that the resulting tragedy and fatalities can be attributed at least partly to the devil's bargain of prioritizing profit over human lives. In these initial books of what is projected to be a seven-book series, the fire aboard the ship and the series of deceptive transactions that culminated in mass murder are a sinister underlying element, showing themselves only in fleeting flashes of detail or inference yet casting a deepening shadow over all that occurs. Some individuals may question how much it is feasible to interpret this volume as a stand-alone piece, when its aim and significance are so deeply bound into a broader whole whose ultimate shape, at this stage, is unknowable.

Experimental Writing: Ethics and Aesthetics Fused

Some individuals—and I count myself as one of them—who will fall in love with the author's project purely as written art, as properly innovative writing whose moral and artistic intent are so profoundly interlinked as to make them inextricable. “Write poems / for we need / that too.” There is another fire here: a passionate, magnetic devotion to writing as a statement. I intend to persist to follow this literary journey, wherever it leads.