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In the late night of the 7th of April 1990, a catastrophic blaze erupted on board the MS Scandinavian Star, a passenger ferry operating between Frederikshavn and Oslo. Insufficient crew training combined with jammed safety doors accelerated the propagation of the flames, while deadly hydrogen cyanide gas released from combusting materials caused the deaths of 159 individuals. Initially, the disaster was attributed to a passenger—a truck driver with a record of arson. Since this individual also died in the incident and was not able to defend himself, the full facts regarding the event remained concealed for many years. It wasn't until 2020 that a comprehensive documentary disclosed the blaze was probably started intentionally as part of an insurance fraud.

Asta Olivia Nordenhof's Scandinavian Star Sequence: A Glimpse

In the first volume of Nordenhof's Scandinavian Star series, the preceding volume, an unidentified narrator is riding on a bus through Copenhagen when she notices an elderly man on the sidewalk. As the bus moves away, she experiences an “eerie sense” that she is taking a piece of him with her. Driven to retrace the journey in pursuit of him, the narrator finds herself in a setting that is both alien and deeply familiar. She introduces readers to a couple named Maggie and Kurt, whose connection is tested by the burdens of their troubled histories. In the concluding section of that volume, it is implied that the source of the character's discontent may originate in a poor financial decision made on his behalf by a individual known as T.

This New Volume: A Unique Narrative Style

This second installment opens with an lengthy poetic passage in which the writer explains her challenge to compose T's narrative. “Within this second volume,” she writes, “we were meant / to follow him / from childhood up until / the evening / when he sat anticipating for / the news that / the fire / on the Scandinavian Star / had successfully been / ignited.” Overwhelmed by the undertaking she has assigned herself and disrupted by the global health crisis, she tackles the story obliquely, 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 erotic thriller / about entrepreneurs and / the devil.”

A narrative gradually unfolds of a female character who spends lockdown in the UK capital with a virtual stranger and during those days relates to him what occurred to her a ten years earlier, when she agreed to an offer from a figure who claimed to be the evil entity to grant all her wishes, so long as she didn't question his intentions. As the elements of the dual narratives become more intertwined, we start to believe that they are one and the same—or at the very least that the identity of T is multiple, for there are demonic forces everywhere.

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

Pacts and Consequences: A Thematic Examination

Classic stories instruct 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 young woman whose early years was marred by mistreatment and who spent time in a mental health facility, under pressure to conform with social expectations or suffer further harm. “[This entity] understands that in the scenario you've created for it, there are a pair of outcomes: submit or stay a monster.” A alternative path is ultimately unveiled through a series of poems to the darkness that are also a call to arms against the influences of capital.

Parallels and Readings: From Literature to Real Events

Many UK readers of the author's Scandinavian Star books will reflect immediately of the London tower fire, which, though unintentional in origin, bears similarities in that the resulting disaster and loss of life can be linked at least partly to the devil's bargain of prioritizing financial gain over people. In these first two books of what is planned to be a multi-volume series, the blaze aboard the ferry and the chain of deceptive business deals that ended in multiple deaths are a ominous underlying presence, showing themselves only in brief flashes of detail or implication yet projecting a deepening influence over everything that occurs. Some individuals may doubt how far it is feasible to read this volume as a independent piece, when its aim and meaning are so deeply tied into a larger narrative whose ultimate shape, at this stage, is uncertain.

Innovative Prose: Art and Morality Fused

There will be others—and I include myself as among them—who will fall in love with the author's project purely as text, as truly experimental writing whose moral and creative intent are so profoundly interlinked as to make them inseparable. “Compose verses / for we require / that as well.” Another kind of blaze exists: an intense, magnetic commitment to writing as a statement. I will persist to pursue this series, no matter where it goes.