The Helmet of Horror: The Myth of Theseus and the Minotaur

A cyber-age retelling of the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur from one of Russia’s most exciting young writers.
Labyrinth (noun): An intricate structure of intercommunicating passages, through which it is difficult to find one’s way without a clue; a maze.

They have never met; they have been assigned strange pseudonyms; they inhabit identical rooms which open out onto very different landscapes; and they have entered into a dialogue which they cannot escape – a discourse defined and destroyed by the Helmet of Horror. Its wearer is the dominant force they call Asterisk, a force for good and ill in which the Minotaur is forever present and Theseus is the great unknown.

Victor Pelevin has created a mesmerising world where the surreal and the hyperreal collide. The Helmet of Horror is structured according to the internet exchanges of the twenty-first century, yet instilled with the figures and narratives of classical mythology. It is a labyrinthine examination of epistemological uncertainty that radically reinvents the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur for an age where information is abundant but knowledge seems ultimately unattainable.