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In the late night of April 7 1990, a devastating blaze broke out aboard the MS Scandinavian Star, a passenger ferry operating between Oslo and Frederikshavn. Insufficient staff preparedness along with malfunctioning fire doors aided the spread of the fire, while toxic hydrogen cyanide gas released from combusting laminates caused the deaths of 159 individuals. Initially, the tragedy was blamed to a traveler—a lorry driver with a record of arson. Given that this individual also died in the incident and was unable to defend the accusations, the full facts about the disaster stayed concealed for many years. It wasn't until 2020 that a comprehensive investigation disclosed the fire was probably started intentionally as part of an insurance fraud.

Nordenhof's Literary Series: A Glimpse

In the first volume of Nordenhof's epic series, Money to Burn, an unidentified protagonist is traveling on a public transport through Copenhagen when she notices 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. Driven to retrace the route in search of him, the narrator enters a landscape that is both unfamiliar and strangely known. She introduces readers to Maggie and Kurt, whose connection is strained by the burdens of their troubled pasts. In the final pages of that volume, it is suggested that the root of Kurt's discontent may originate in a disastrous investment made on his behalf by a man known as T.

This New Volume: A Unique Narrative Style

This second installment begins with an extended poetic passage in which the narrator explains her struggle to write T's story. “In this volume, two,” she writes, “we were supposed / to trace him / from youth up until / the evening / when he sat anticipating for / the report that / the blaze / on the Scandinavian Star / had successfully been / ignited.” Overwhelmed by the task she has set herself and derailed by the pandemic, she tackles the tale indirectly, as a form of parable. “It occurred to me / that I / can do / anything I want / so this / is my book / this is / for you / this is / an erotic thriller / about businessmen and / the devil.”

A narrative gradually emerges of a female character who experiences lockdown in the UK capital with a near-unknown person and over the course of those weeks relates to him what happened to her a decade before, when she agreed to an proposal from a man who professed to be the evil entity to fulfill all her wishes, so long as she didn't question his intentions. As the threads of the dual narratives become more interwoven, we start to suspect that they are identical—or at minimum that the identity of T is legion, for there are demonic forces all around.

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

Pacts and Consequences: A Literary Examination

Literature instruct us that it is the devil who does deals, not a divine being, and that we enter into them at our risk. But what if the protagonist herself is the malevolent force? A additional narrative eventually emerges—the story of a young woman whose early years was scarred by mistreatment and who spent time in a psychiatric hospital, under duress to comply with social expectations or suffer more of the same. “[This entity] understands that in the scenario you've set for it, there are two outcomes: submit or remain a beast.” A alternative path is finally unveiled through a series of verses to the darkness that are simultaneously a call to arms against the influences of capital.

Parallels and Readings: From Literature to Reality

Numerous UK audience members of the author's Scandinavian Star books will think immediately of the Grenfell Tower tragedy, which, though unintentional in origin, shares parallels in that the resulting disaster and loss of life can be linked at least partly to the devil's bargain of prioritizing profit over people. In these initial books of what is planned to be a seven-book series, the fire aboard the ship and the series of deceptive transactions that ended in multiple deaths are a sinister underlying element, showing themselves only in fleeting glimpses of detail or inference yet projecting a growing shadow over all that transpires. Certain individuals may doubt how much it is possible to interpret The Devil Book as a stand-alone piece, when its aim and significance are so intricately tied into a broader whole whose ultimate shape, at this stage, is unknowable.

Innovative Prose: Ethics and Aesthetics Fused

There will be others—and I include myself as among them—who will become enamored with Nordenhof's endeavor purely as written art, as truly experimental writing whose ethical and artistic intent are so profoundly interlinked as to make them inextricable. “Write poems / for we need / that as well.” Another kind of blaze exists: an intense, magnetic devotion to the craft as a political act. I intend to persist to pursue this series, wherever it goes.