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In the late night of the 7th of April 1990, a catastrophic fire broke out on board the ferry Scandinavian Star, a passenger ferry traveling between Oslo and Frederikshavn. Insufficient staff training along with malfunctioning safety doors accelerated the spread of the flames, while toxic cyanide gas emitted from combusting materials caused the loss of 159 individuals. At first, the disaster was blamed to a passenger—a lorry driver with a record of arson. Since this individual too perished in the incident and was unable to defend himself, the full facts regarding the event stayed concealed for many years. It wasn't until 2020 that a comprehensive documentary disclosed the fire was likely set deliberately as part of an insurance fraud.

Asta Olivia Nordenhof's Scandinavian Star Sequence: An Overview

In the first volume of Asta Olivia Nordenhof's epic series, the preceding volume, an unidentified narrator is traveling on a public transport through Copenhagen when she notices an elderly man on the street. As the vehicle drives away, she experiences an “eerie sense” that she is taking a piece of him with her. Compelled to retrace the route in search of him, the character finds herself in a setting that is both alien and deeply familiar. She presents us to a couple named Maggie and Kurt, whose connection is strained by the pressures of their conflicted pasts. In the concluding section of that book, it is implied that the source of Kurt's disaffection may stem from a disastrous financial decision made on his behalf by a individual 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 challenge to write T's narrative. “In this second volume,” she writes, “we were supposed / to follow him / from childhood up until / the night / when he sat anticipating for / the news that / the blaze / on the Scandinavian Star / had effectively been / ignited.” Overwhelmed by the undertaking she has set herself and derailed by the global health crisis, she tackles the story obliquely, as a type of allegory. “It occurred to me / that I / can do / anything I want / so this / is my book / this is / for you / this is / an sensational story / about entrepreneurs and / the devil.”

A narrative slowly unfolds of a female character who experiences lockdown in London with a near-unknown person and over the course of those weeks relates to him what occurred to her a decade before, when she accepted 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 intentions. As the threads of the two stories become more intertwined, we start to suspect that they are identical—or at the very least that the nature of T is multiple, for there are demonic forces all around.

There is another fire here: a passionate, magnetic dedication to writing as a political act

Deals with the Devil: A Thematic Examination

Classic stories instruct us that it is the devil who makes bargains, not a divine being, and that we engage in them at our peril. But what if the narrator herself is the malevolent force? A additional storyline eventually emerges—the story of a girl whose early years was scarred by mistreatment and who was placed in a mental health facility, under pressure to conform with societal norms or suffer further harm. “[This entity] understands that in the scenario you've created for it, there are two outcomes: submit or remain a monster.” A third way out is finally revealed through a series of poems to the night that are also a call to arms against the influences of wealth and power.

Parallels and Readings: From Fiction to Reality

Numerous British readers of the author's Scandinavian Star books will think immediately of the Grenfell Tower fire, which, though accidental in origin, bears similarities in that the ensuing disaster and loss of life can be linked at in part to the devil's bargain of putting profit over people. In these initial books of what is projected to be a seven-book sequence, the fire on board the ship and the chain of fraudulent transactions that ended in multiple deaths are a ominous underlying presence, showing themselves only in fleeting glimpses of detail or inference yet projecting a deepening shadow over all that occurs. Some individuals may doubt how far it is feasible to read The Devil Book as a independent work, when its purpose and significance are so deeply bound into a broader narrative whose final form, at present, is unknowable.

Experimental Writing: Ethics and Aesthetics Fused

Some individuals—and I include myself as one of them—who will become enamored with the author's endeavor purely as written art, as truly experimental literature whose ethical and creative purpose are so profoundly interlinked as to make them inseparable. “Write poems / for we need / that too.” There is another fire here: an intense, magnetic devotion to the craft as a statement. I will persist to pursue this series, no matter where it leads.