The Helmet of Horror

The genre of this work is a piece written in the form of a chat between the characters. But in Pelevine's production, on his site, it is listed in the novel category, and several articles on the subject also use the name novel. But some critics refer to the work as a play genre, or as a dramatic narrative.[5]

Eight characters are participants in a very strange chat. Each of them, in an unknown way, finds himself in one of the very similar rooms with a keyboard and a computer. Soon they understand that they have become participants in the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. But the situation is much more complex than it seems at first glance.[6]

Each character has his or her own labyrinth behind the door of his or her 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.[7]