Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #117183 in Books
• Published on: 2007-03-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Review
'It presents ideas that the wider European mind finds useful, and it is sharp, funny and, what's the word, numinous.' --Sunday Times

Review
'Pelevin is a highly inventive writer with a sharp, jaundiced eye and an anarchic sensibility.'

Review
'A brilliant post-modern, eclectic vision of myth, mind and meaning.'

Customer Reviews

Some labyrinth!
I know the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur, and I have - very rarely - looked in on chatrooms - rarely, because the chat in the ones I have visited is usually so inane. The book does mirror the inconsequentialness of some of these chatrooms; but if there is some method in the madness of this version of the myth, I'm afraid I just didn't get it. My mind not only does not work this way, but can't understand a mind that does. So I've got lost all right! My fault, no doubt.

Mind-blowing
This is intense, surreal and absolutely original. It's written in the form of a chatroom, a wonderfully vibrant hybrid of play, epistolary novel and screenplay. It immediately spirals you into a claustrophobic world of philosophic thriller where a number of trapped characters try to figure out a way to escape their maze -- but then they get more and more lost in, and also mesmerised, by their labyrinth. Some of them fall in love, others discuss myth and the meaning of perception -- this is very Russian and reminds me of Tarkovsky sci-fi films ('Solaris', 'Stalker'). The helmet of horror itself is described in such hyper-real hallucinatory detail that it really is the stuff of nightmare and dream, but also strangely plausible. I was riveted by this book and it's been resonating with me for weeks.

Entertaining
This is a little pretentious but a very enjoyable, primarily for trying something different. Keeps air of mystery and suspense throughout and the end isn't a wash out. Well worth the read.