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During the late night of the 7th of April 1990, a devastating blaze erupted aboard the MS Scandinavian Star, a passenger ferry traveling between Oslo and Frederikshavn. Inadequate crew preparedness along with jammed fire doors aided the spread of the fire, while toxic hydrogen cyanide gas emitted from combusting laminates caused the deaths of 159 people. Initially, the disaster was attributed to a traveler—a truck driver with a history of arson. Given that this individual also died in the incident and was unable to defend the accusations, the complete truth about the disaster stayed concealed for many years. Only in 2020 that a comprehensive documentary disclosed the blaze was probably set deliberately as part of an insurance fraud.

Nordenhof's Literary Sequence: A Glimpse

In the first volume of Nordenhof's Scandinavian Star series, the preceding volume, an unidentified protagonist is traveling on a public transport through Copenhagen when she observes an elderly man on the sidewalk. As the vehicle drives away, she experiences an “uncanny feeling” that she is taking a part of him with her. Compelled to repeat the journey in pursuit of him, the narrator finds herself in a landscape that is both unfamiliar and strangely known. She introduces readers to a couple named Maggie and Kurt, whose connection is tested by the burdens of their troubled pasts. In the final pages of that volume, it is implied that the source of the character's disaffection may originate in a poor investment made on his account by a individual known as T.

The Devil Book: A Unique Approach

This second installment opens with an lengthy prose poem in which the narrator describes her struggle to write T's story. “Within this volume, two,” she writes, “we were supposed / to trace him / from youth up until / the night / when he sat waiting for / the news that / the fire / on the Scandinavian Star / had effectively been / ignited.” Overwhelmed by the task she has assigned herself and disrupted by the global health crisis, she tackles the story obliquely, as a form of parable. “It occurred to me / that I / can do / anything I want / so this / is my work / this is / for you / this is / an erotic thriller / about entrepreneurs and / the devil.”

A tale slowly emerges of a woman who spends quarantine in London with a near-unknown person and during those days relates to him what occurred to her a ten years earlier, when she agreed to an proposal from a man who claimed to be the devil to grant all her desires, so long as she didn't question his motives. As the threads of the dual narratives become more interwoven, we begin to believe 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: an ardent, compelling dedication to writing as a form of activism

Pacts and Consequences: A Thematic Examination

Literature teach us that it is the devil who does bargains, not a divine being, and that we engage in them at our risk. But what if the protagonist herself is the devil? A additional narrative comes finally to light—the story of a young woman whose childhood was marred by abuse and who spent time in a psychiatric hospital, under pressure to conform with societal norms or suffer more of the same. “[The devil] understands that in the scenario you've created for it, there are a pair of outcomes: submit or remain a monster.” A alternative path is finally unveiled through a series of poems to the darkness that are also a call to arms against the influences of capital.

Connections and Readings: From Fiction to Real Events

Many UK readers of Nordenhof's series books will think right away of the London tower tragedy, which, though unintentional in origin, bears similarities in that the ensuing tragedy and fatalities can be attributed at least partly to the devil's bargain of prioritizing financial gain over human lives. In these first two books of what is planned to be a multi-volume series, the blaze aboard the ship and the chain of fraudulent transactions that ended in mass murder are a sinister underlying element, showing themselves only in brief glimpses of detail or implication yet projecting a deepening influence over all that occurs. Some readers may question how far it is feasible to interpret The Devil Book as a independent work, when its purpose and significance are so deeply bound into a larger whole whose ultimate shape, at this stage, is uncertain.

Innovative Prose: Art and Morality Intertwined

Some individuals—and I count myself as one of them—who will fall in love with the author's project purely as text, as properly innovative writing whose moral and artistic intent are so deeply interlinked as to make them inextricable. “Write poems / for we require / that too.” There is another fire here: a passionate, magnetic commitment to writing as a statement. I intend to persist to pursue this series, no matter where it leads.