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During the early hours of the 7th of April 1990, a catastrophic fire erupted aboard the ferry Scandinavian Star, a passenger ferry traveling between Oslo and Frederikshavn. Inadequate crew training combined with malfunctioning safety doors accelerated the propagation of the flames, while toxic hydrogen cyanide gas released from combusting laminates led to the deaths of 159 individuals. Initially, the disaster was blamed to a traveler—a truck driver with a history of fire-setting. Since this individual too died in the fire and was not able to defend the accusations, the complete truth regarding the event stayed concealed for many years. Only in 2020 that a detailed investigation disclosed the blaze was likely set deliberately as part of an insurance fraud.

Nordenhof's Literary Sequence: A Glimpse

Within the first volume of Asta Olivia Nordenhof's epic series, Money to Burn, an unidentified narrator is traveling on a bus through Copenhagen when she notices an elderly man on the sidewalk. As the vehicle drives away, she experiences an “uncanny feeling” that she is carrying a piece of him with her. Compelled to repeat the route in pursuit of him, the narrator finds herself in a landscape that is both alien and deeply familiar. She presents readers to a couple named Maggie and Kurt, whose connection is strained by the burdens of their troubled pasts. In the concluding section of that book, it is implied that the source of Kurt's discontent may originate in a poor financial decision made on his behalf by a man known as T.

This New Volume: An Unconventional Narrative Style

This second installment opens with an extended poetic passage in which the narrator explains her challenge to compose T's story. “Within this volume, two,” she states, “we were supposed / to follow him / from youth up until / the night / when he sat anticipating for / the report that / the blaze / on the ferry / had effectively been / ignited.” Burdened by the undertaking she has assigned herself and disrupted by the global health crisis, she tackles the tale obliquely, as a form 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 businessmen and / the dark force.”

A tale slowly emerges of a woman who spends lockdown in the UK capital with a near-unknown person and over the course of those weeks relates to him what happened to her a decade before, when she agreed to an offer from a man who professed to be the evil entity to fulfill all her desires, so long as she didn't doubt his motives. As the threads of the dual narratives become more interwoven, we start to suspect 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 writing as a form of activism

Pacts and Consequences: A Literary Exploration

Literature instruct us that it is the devil who does bargains, not a divine being, and that we engage in them at our peril. But what if the protagonist herself is the malevolent force? A third narrative eventually emerges—the account of a young woman whose early years was scarred by abuse and who spent time in a mental health facility, under pressure to conform with social expectations or endure more of the same. “[This entity] understands that in the game you've set for it, there are a pair of outcomes: surrender or stay a monster.” A alternative path is ultimately revealed through a series of poems to the night that are simultaneously a rallying cry against the influences of capital.

Parallels and Interpretations: From Fiction to Real Events

Many British readers of the author's series novels will think immediately of the London tower tragedy, which, though accidental in cause, bears parallels in that the resulting tragedy and loss of life can be linked at in part to the devil's bargain of prioritizing financial gain over human lives. In these initial volumes of what is planned to be a multi-volume series, the blaze on board the ferry and the series of deceptive business deals that ended in multiple deaths are a ominous background presence, revealing themselves only in brief glimpses of information or implication yet projecting a deepening shadow over everything that transpires. Certain individuals may doubt how far it is possible to read The Devil Book as a independent work, when its aim and significance are so deeply tied into a larger narrative whose ultimate shape, at present, is unknowable.

Experimental Writing: Ethics and Aesthetics Intertwined

Some individuals—and I count myself as among them—who will become enamored with Nordenhof's project purely as text, as properly innovative literature whose moral and artistic purpose are so deeply interlinked as to make them inseparable. “Write poems / for we need / that too.” Another kind of blaze exists: a passionate, attractive commitment to writing as a political act. I will continue to follow this series, wherever it leads.