The Helmet of Horror

“A brilliant new telling” of the Theseus and Minotaur myth set in a cyberspace labyrinth—from the award-winning Russian writer (Publishers Weekly, starred review). Victor Pelevin, the iconoclastic and wildly interesting contemporary Russian novelist who The New Yorker named one of the Best European Writers Under 35, upends any conventional notions of mythology in this “sharp, funny and . . . numinous” novel (The Sunday Times). By creating a mesmerizing world where the surreal and the hyperreal collide, The Helmet of Horror is a radical retelling of the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur set in an Internet chat room. They have never met, they have been assigned strange pseudonyms, they inhabit identical rooms that open out onto very different landscapes, and they have entered a dialogue 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. The Helmet of Horror is structured according to the way we communicate in the twenty-first century—using the Internet—yet instilled with the figures and narratives of classical mythology. It is a labyrinthine examination of epistemological uncertainty that radically reinvents this myth for an age where information is abundant but knowledge ultimately unattainable. “The classical myth is reinterpreted with black-comic brio . . . Is Pelevin after all Russia’s Thomas Pynchon?”—Kirkus Reviews “A brilliant post-modern, eclectic vision of myth, mind and meaning. And of the human dilemma and its horns, ancient and modern.”—A. S. Byatt, The Times