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In the early hours of the 7th of April 1990, a devastating blaze erupted aboard the ferry Scandinavian Star, a passenger ferry traveling between Frederikshavn and Oslo. Inadequate staff preparedness combined with malfunctioning fire doors aided the spread of the flames, while toxic hydrogen cyanide gas released from combusting materials led to the deaths of 159 people. At first, the tragedy was attributed to a passenger—a lorry driver with a history of arson. Given that this individual also died in the incident and was not able to refute himself, the full facts about the disaster remained concealed for many years. It wasn't until 2020 that a detailed documentary disclosed the fire was probably started deliberately as part of an insurance fraud.

Asta Olivia Nordenhof's Scandinavian Star Series: A Glimpse

In the initial book of Asta Olivia Nordenhof's epic series, Money to Burn, an unnamed protagonist is traveling on a public transport through Copenhagen when she observes an elderly man on the street. As the bus moves away, she feels an “uncanny feeling” that she is carrying a piece of him with her. Driven to repeat the route in search of him, the narrator enters a landscape that is both alien and strangely known. She presents us to Maggie and Kurt, whose connection is strained by the burdens of their troubled pasts. In the final pages of that book, it is suggested that the root of the character's disaffection may originate in a disastrous investment made on his account by a man known as T.

The Devil Book: A Unique Approach

This second installment opens with an extended prose poem in which the writer describes her struggle to write T's story. “Within this second volume,” 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 undertaking she has assigned herself and disrupted by the global health crisis, she approaches the tale obliquely, as a type 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 sensational story / about businessmen and / the dark force.”

A tale slowly emerges of a female character who experiences lockdown in London with a virtual stranger and over the course of those days relates to him what happened to her a decade earlier, when she accepted an offer from a man who claimed to be the evil entity to grant all her wishes, so long as she didn't doubt his intentions. As the threads of the two stories become more intertwined, we start to believe that they are identical—or at the very least that the nature of T is legion, for there are devils everywhere.

There is another fire here: a passionate, compelling dedication to writing as a form of activism

Deals with the Devil: A Thematic Examination

Classic stories teach us that it is the dark figure who makes deals, not God, and that we enter into them at our risk. But suppose the protagonist herself is the malevolent force? A third narrative eventually emerges—the story of a girl whose early years was marred by abuse and who spent time in a mental health facility, under pressure to comply with social expectations or endure more of the same. “[This entity] understands that in the game you've created for it, there are a pair of results: submit or stay a beast.” A alternative path is finally revealed through a series of verses to the darkness that are simultaneously a call to arms against the forces of capital.

Connections and Readings: From Fiction to Real Events

Numerous UK audience members of the author's Scandinavian Star books will reflect immediately of the London tower tragedy, which, though unintentional in origin, bears parallels in that the resulting tragedy and fatalities can be linked at least partly to the devil's bargain of prioritizing profit over people. In these initial books of what is projected to be a multi-volume sequence, the fire on board the ferry and the series of deceptive transactions that ended in multiple deaths are a ominous underlying presence, revealing themselves only in brief glimpses of detail or implication yet casting a growing influence over all that occurs. Certain readers may doubt how far it is possible to read this volume as a independent work, when its aim and significance are so intricately bound into a larger whole whose final form, at present, is uncertain.

Innovative Prose: Ethics and Aesthetics Intertwined

Some individuals—and I include myself as one of them—who will fall in love with Nordenhof's project purely as written art, as properly innovative writing whose moral and creative purpose are so deeply interlinked as to make them inseparable. “Compose verses / for we require / that too.” Another kind of blaze exists: an intense, attractive devotion to the craft as a statement. I will persist to follow this series, wherever it leads.