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During the early hours of April 7 1990, a catastrophic blaze broke out aboard the ferry Scandinavian Star, a car and passenger ferry operating between Oslo and Frederikshavn. Inadequate crew training along with malfunctioning fire doors accelerated the propagation of the flames, while toxic cyanide gas emitted from combusting laminates led to the deaths of 159 people. Initially, the tragedy was blamed to a passenger—a truck driver with a history of fire-setting. Since this suspect too died in the incident and was not able to defend himself, the complete facts about the disaster remained concealed for a long time. It wasn't until 2020 that a detailed investigation disclosed the fire was likely set intentionally as part of an fraud scheme.

Nordenhof's Scandinavian Star Series: A Glimpse

Within the first volume of Nordenhof's Scandinavian Star sequence, the preceding volume, an unnamed narrator is traveling on a public transport through the Danish capital when she observes an elderly man on the sidewalk. As the vehicle drives away, she feels an “uncanny feeling” that she is carrying a part of him with her. Driven to retrace the journey in pursuit of him, the character enters a landscape that is both alien and deeply familiar. She presents us to a couple named Maggie and Kurt, whose relationship is tested by the burdens of their troubled histories. In the final pages of that book, it is suggested that the source of the character's discontent may originate in a poor financial decision made on his account by a man known as T.

This New Volume: A Unique Narrative Style

This second installment begins with an lengthy poetic passage in which the writer explains her challenge to write T's narrative. “In this second volume,” she writes, “we were meant / to follow him / from childhood up until / the night / when he sat anticipating for / the news that / the blaze / on the Scandinavian Star / had successfully been / set.” Burdened by the task she has assigned herself and disrupted by the global health crisis, she tackles the tale indirectly, as a form of parable. “I came to think / that I / can do / anything 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 unfolds of a female character who spends lockdown in the UK capital with a virtual stranger and during those days tells to him what occurred to her a decade before, when she agreed to an offer from a man who professed to be the evil entity to grant all her desires, so long as she didn't doubt his motives. As the elements of the two stories become more interwoven, we begin to believe that they are one and the same—or at minimum that the nature of T is multiple, for there are demonic forces everywhere.

There is another fire here: an ardent, magnetic commitment to literature as a political act

Pacts and Consequences: A Literary Exploration

Literature instruct us that it is the dark figure who does deals, not a divine being, and that we engage in them at our risk. But what if the narrator herself is the devil? A additional storyline eventually emerges—the story of a girl whose childhood was scarred by abuse and who spent time in a mental health facility, under duress to conform with societal norms or endure more of the same. “[This entity] understands that in the game you've set for it, there are a pair of outcomes: submit or remain a monster.” A third way out is ultimately unveiled through a series of verses to the darkness that are also a rallying cry against the forces of capital.

Parallels and Interpretations: From Fiction to Reality

Many UK audience members of Nordenhof's series books will think immediately of the Grenfell Tower tragedy, which, though accidental in cause, shares similarities in that the resulting disaster and loss of life can be attributed at in part to the devil's bargain of prioritizing profit over people. In these initial books of what is projected to be a seven-book series, the fire aboard the ferry and the series of deceptive business deals that ended in mass murder are a sinister underlying presence, revealing themselves only in fleeting glimpses of detail or inference yet casting a deepening shadow over all that transpires. Some individuals may doubt how much it is possible to read The Devil Book as a independent work, when its purpose and meaning are so intricately bound into a larger narrative whose ultimate shape, at present, is uncertain.

Experimental Writing: Art and Morality Fused

There will be others—and I count myself as one of them—who will fall in love with the author's project purely as text, as truly experimental writing whose ethical and artistic intent are so deeply interlinked as to make them inseparable. “Write poems / for we require / that too.” There is another fire here: a passionate, attractive commitment to writing as a political act. I intend to continue to pursue this series, no matter where it leads.