Title The Helmet of Horror: The Myth of Theseus and the Minotaur Series Canongate's The Myths Author Victor Pelevin Cover Art --- Publisher Canongate - 2005 First Printing Canongate - 2005 Category Mythology Warnings Requires a PhD in philosophy to understand Website --- Main Characters Ariadne, Monstradamus, and other screen names Main Elements Retelling

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 what mythology must be with his unique take on the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. 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.

Some of the Canongate myth retellings are amazing, others are incredibly boring or seemingly unrelated to any myth. This one managed to land somewhere in the middle of the pack. Probably the number one comment I saw on Goodreads was "I didn't get it", which made me feel better, since I didn't get it either. See, the Labyrinth is sorta there, each person in the Internet chat thread is trapped in a room that leads to what appears to be their own personal labyrinth. The person who starts the Internet thread is Ariadne, and she dreams of...well Minotaur might be a bit of a stretch, he's a giant guy wearing a helmet that does indeed have horns (of plenty no less) and served by two dwarves. And everyone is wondering where Theseus is, or maybe they are all Theseus...or maybe they are all the Minotaur...yes, it is a book on philosophy, and again from the Goodreads comments, if you studied philosophy in school you'd apparently recognize some stuff. I studied computer engineering, so I muddled through the best I could.

Some of the discussions of reality were in fact interesting, and there are moments of humour too, I mean take this quote:

“Life’s like falling off a roof. Can you stop on the way? No. Can you turn back? No. Can you fly off sideways? Only in an advertisement for underpants specially made for jumping off roofs. All free will means is you can choose whether to fart in mid-flight or wait till you hit the ground. And that’s what all the philosophers argue about.”

Now of course this isn't even remotely a retelling of Theseus and the Minotaur, but if you take that tale and you turn it into an existential examination of the meaning of life, reality, and whether or not we even exist then a labyrinth with a monster in the middle of it makes a pretty good metaphor or allegory for just about anything. From the meandering paths of own minds, to who the heck is Theseus and why did everyone start to MOOOOOO?!? Ok, I have no idea at all what happened at the end, but then, it wasn't like I thought it would all get explained, it wasn't that kind of book. The people in the chat room don't all wake up to find it's a dream, or virtual reality, or some top secret government experiment, it just...ends, with a Zeus cameo of all things!