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

Labyrinth 1 is 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 is ultimately unattainable.

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