The Hero with a Thousand Faces
Jeff Noon says "Vurt" originally began as an adaptation of Octave Mirbeau's "The Torture Garden", an anti-authoritarian novel written at the turn of the 20th century. Noon, recently exposed to virtual reality technology by the magazine Mondo 2000, depicts the torture garden as a virtual world. Noon also credits Joseph Campbell's book "The Hero with a Thousand Faces" for inspiring the narrative structure of "Vurt".