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During the late night of the 7th of April 1990, a devastating fire erupted on board the ferry Scandinavian Star, a car and passenger ferry traveling between Oslo and Frederikshavn. Inadequate staff training along with jammed safety doors aided the spread of the fire, while toxic cyanide gas released from burning laminates led to the loss of 159 individuals. At first, the tragedy was attributed to a passenger—a truck driver with a record of fire-setting. Since this suspect too perished in the incident and was unable to defend himself, the complete truth regarding the event remained concealed for many years. Only in 2020 that a comprehensive documentary revealed the blaze was likely set deliberately as part of an insurance fraud.

Nordenhof's Literary Series: A Glimpse

Within the first volume of Nordenhof's epic series, the preceding volume, an unidentified narrator is riding on a public transport through the Danish capital when she notices an elderly man on the sidewalk. As the vehicle moves away, she feels an “uncanny feeling” that she is taking a piece of him with her. Driven to retrace the journey in pursuit of him, the narrator enters a landscape that is both alien and deeply familiar. She presents readers to a couple named Maggie and Kurt, whose relationship is strained by the pressures of their conflicted pasts. In the final pages of that book, it is suggested that the source of Kurt's discontent may originate in a disastrous investment made on his behalf by a man referred to as T.

This New Volume: A Unique Narrative Style

This second installment opens with an extended prose poem in which the narrator explains her struggle to compose T's story. “Within this second volume,” she writes, “we were supposed / to trace him / from youth up until / the night / when he sat anticipating for / the news that / the fire / on the Scandinavian Star / had successfully been / ignited.” Burdened by the task she has set herself and disrupted by the pandemic, she approaches the tale indirectly, as a type of allegory. “It occurred to me / that I / can do / anything I want / so this / is my book / this is / for you / this is / an sensational story / about entrepreneurs and / the devil.”

A tale slowly emerges of a woman who experiences lockdown in London with a near-unknown person and during those days tells to him what occurred to her a ten years before, when she agreed to an proposal from a man who professed to be the evil entity to grant all her desires, so long as she didn't question his motives. As the elements of the dual narratives become more intertwined, we start to believe that they are identical—or at minimum that the identity of T is multiple, for there are devils everywhere.

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

Pacts and Consequences: A Thematic Exploration

Literature teach us that it is the dark figure who makes deals, not God, and that we engage in them at our risk. But suppose the protagonist herself is the devil? A additional storyline eventually emerges—the account of a young woman whose early years was marred by abuse and who spent time in a psychiatric hospital, under duress to comply with social expectations or suffer more of the same. “[This entity] knows that in the scenario you've created for it, there are two outcomes: submit or remain a beast.” A alternative path is finally revealed through a series of poems to the darkness that are also a call to arms against the forces of wealth and power.

Connections and Readings: From Fiction to Real Events

Numerous British readers of the author's series books will think right away of the London tower tragedy, which, though accidental in origin, shares parallels in that the ensuing tragedy and loss of life can be attributed at least partly to the devil's bargain of prioritizing financial gain over human lives. In these initial books of what is planned to be a seven-book sequence, the fire on board the ferry and the chain of deceptive transactions that culminated in multiple deaths are a sinister background element, showing themselves only in fleeting flashes of information or inference yet projecting a deepening shadow over all that occurs. Some individuals may question how far it is possible to read The Devil Book as a stand-alone work, when its aim and meaning are so deeply bound into a broader whole whose ultimate shape, at present, is uncertain.

Experimental Writing: Ethics and Aesthetics Fused

There will be others—and I include myself as one of them—who will fall in love with Nordenhof's project purely as written art, as truly experimental literature whose ethical and artistic purpose are so deeply interlinked as to make them inseparable. “Compose verses / for we require / that too.” Another kind of blaze exists: an intense, magnetic commitment to the craft as a statement. I intend to persist to follow this series, no matter where it goes.