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In the early hours of the 7th of April 1990, a devastating fire broke out aboard the MS Scandinavian Star, a car and passenger ferry operating between Oslo and Frederikshavn. Inadequate staff preparedness along with jammed safety doors aided the spread of the fire, while toxic hydrogen cyanide gas released from burning laminates led to the loss of 159 people. Initially, the tragedy was attributed to a passenger—a truck driver with a history of fire-setting. Since this suspect too died in the incident and was unable to defend himself, the full truth about the event stayed concealed for a long time. Only in 2020 that a comprehensive documentary revealed the fire was likely set intentionally as part of an fraud scheme.

Asta Olivia Nordenhof's Literary Series: An Overview

Within the first volume of Asta Olivia Nordenhof's epic sequence, Money to Burn, an unidentified narrator is traveling on a public transport through the Danish capital when she observes an elderly man on the street. As the vehicle drives away, she experiences an “uncanny feeling” that she is carrying a part of him with her. Driven to retrace the journey in search of him, the narrator finds herself in a landscape that is both alien and strangely known. She introduces us to Maggie and Kurt, whose relationship is strained by the pressures of their conflicted pasts. In the final pages of that volume, it is implied that the root of the character's disaffection may stem from a disastrous investment made on his account by a individual known as T.

The Devil Book: A Unique Approach

The Devil Book opens with an lengthy prose poem in which the narrator describes her struggle to compose T's story. “In this second volume,” she writes, “we were meant / to follow him / from youth up until / the evening / when he sat waiting for / the report that / the fire / on the ferry / had effectively been / set.” Overwhelmed by the undertaking she has assigned herself and disrupted by the pandemic, she tackles the tale obliquely, 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 erotic thriller / about entrepreneurs and / the dark force.”

A narrative gradually emerges 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 occurred to her a decade earlier, when she agreed to an offer from a figure who professed to be the devil to grant all her wishes, so long as she didn't question his intentions. As the threads of the dual narratives become more intertwined, we begin to believe that they are identical—or at minimum that the nature of T is multiple, for there are devils all around.

There is another fire here: an ardent, magnetic commitment to literature as a form of activism

Deals with the Devil: A Literary Exploration

Literature instruct us that it is the dark figure who makes bargains, not a divine being, and that we engage in them at our risk. But suppose the protagonist herself is the devil? A third narrative eventually emerges—the story of a young woman whose childhood was scarred by mistreatment and who was placed in a mental health facility, under pressure to comply with social expectations or suffer further harm. “[The devil] knows that in the game you've set for it, there are two results: submit or remain a beast.” A third way out is finally revealed through a collection of poems to the darkness that are simultaneously a call to arms against the influences of wealth and power.

Parallels and Readings: From Literature to Real Events

Numerous British readers of the author's series books will reflect immediately of the Grenfell Tower tragedy, which, though accidental in cause, bears parallels in that the ensuing disaster and loss of life can be attributed at in part to the devil's bargain of putting financial gain over human lives. In these initial volumes of what is planned to be a multi-volume series, the fire on board the ferry and the chain of fraudulent transactions that culminated in multiple deaths are a ominous background element, showing themselves only in fleeting glimpses of detail or inference yet casting a deepening influence over all that occurs. Certain readers may doubt how much it is possible to read The Devil Book as a independent piece, when its aim and significance are so deeply bound into a larger narrative whose final form, at present, is unknowable.

Experimental Writing: Art and Morality Fused

There will be others—and I include myself as among them—who will fall in love with the author's project purely as text, as properly innovative writing whose moral and creative intent are so profoundly interlinked as to make them inseparable. “Write poems / for we require / that too.” Another kind of blaze exists: a passionate, magnetic devotion to the craft as a political act. I will continue to follow this series, no matter where it goes.