The Helmet of Horror: The Myth of Theseus and the Minotaur (Myths, The)

When Ariadne helped Theseus escape the MInotaur's labyrinth with the aid of a ball of thread, she led the way for the bewildered victims of a twenty-first century minotaur. Trapped in an endless maze of Internet chatrooms, a group of mystified strangers find themselves assigned obscure aliases and commanded by the Helmet of Horror, the Minotaur himself. As they fumble their way back to reality through a mesmerising world of abundant information but little knowledge, we are forced to wonder - can technology itself be anything more than a myth? 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 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, radically reinventing the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur for an age where information is abundant but knowledge ultimately unattainable.