Since rocketing to dizzying, imaginative heights after the Soviet grip on the arts loosened, Victor Pelevin has spent his bright literary career orbiting the realms of the surreal and the irrational. His latest contribution to the post-Soviet Russian literary canon proves that he has yet to come down from his heroic head-trips.

A radically weird updating of the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur, The Helmet of Horror occurs as a chat-room discussion, wherein a handful of aliases begin to appear, not knowing how they came to be there, and enter into dialogue about their surroundings. Their thread is titled "Ariadne."

Rather than the interconnected, free realm of the Internet, the cyberspace of the novel is a closed network of computer terminals installed in identical, single-occupancy cells, which may (or may not) be physically near one another. Inside each is a locked door covered by strange inscriptions, and any details the occupants try to offer about their identities are censored by omnipresent "moderators." Able to manifest themselves only as disembodied linguistic constructs, the characters band together to understand their universe and to find a way out. The key to all this is a mysterious virtual-reality mask known as the "helmet of horror."

Fueled by Pelevin's trademark dark humor and his impeccable skill as a satirist, the novel leads us through a strange reality built on half-knowledge, dreams, and mutated literary and pop-cultural references ( Romeo and Juliet , Star Wars , Japanese manga, Batman, Christianity, and even Merrill Lynch all make appearances) on the way to a denouement that doesn't disappoint, for all its strangeness. Even if we are condemned to remain imprisoned in our own faintly glowing cubicles, at least we have a writer like Pelevin to pound at the bars.

-Stephen Dougherty