The Helmet of Horror

The Myth of Theseus and the Minotaur

By: Victor Pelevin

Narrated by: uncredited

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 chat rooms, 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?

©2006 Victor Pelevin (P)2012 Canongate Books

Enlightened and Lost

Since all Pelevin's books are more or less about Buddhism (yes, all, just in different words), his main characters roughly fall in two archetypes - kind, strong and determined, who reached satori, enlightenment, by the end of their journey - like poet Pyotr Voyd, the main protagonist of Buddha's Little Finger, werefox Hu Li from The Sacred Book of Werewolf, android girl Kaya from S.N.U.F.F. And those who merely touched the warmth of enlightenment, but appeared to be too selfish or weak to reach the truth - cynical ad man Tatarsky from "Homo Zapiens," or vampire-intellectual Rama from "Empire V." They saw the glimpse of light, but fell back into Sansara, in the illusion of power games, and not in the very pleasant form.

The question to the true lovers of Pelevin's worlds - who were the heroes of the "Helmet of Horror," and who and how reached Satori - for someone unmistakably does.

P.S. Those who suggest that the first letters of chatting characters' usernames form some meaningful "incantation" are right (even not one!), but it happens almost by the end - like the truth itself.