Who or what can’t Keanu Reeves beat in a fight? The titan of action cinema, who has also recently expanded his enthusiasm and prowess to video games, has been taking on a new foe of late: literature. What started as a wildly successful venture into comic books with the Kickstarter-funded series BRZRKR, co-created by Matt Kindt and Ron Garney, has now expanded into Reeves’ first co-written novel, The Book of Elsewhere.
Don’t worry if you’re not familiar — The Book of Elsewhere is not solely for fans of BRZRKR, but it’s a good fit for fans of Keanu Reeves. A philosophical, violent thriller about an immortal soldier pondering the nature of his existence, The Book of Elsewhere has an elegance that might surprise you for a pulp thriller, thanks to Reeves’ chosen collaborator: weird-fiction legend China Miéville.
Miéville is a prolific and wide-ranging writer known as one of the preeminent voices in the “new weird” canon of the ’90s and ’00s, with novels like Perdido Street Station, Embassytown, and The City & the City that, generally speaking, applied the cosmic horror sensibilities of H.P. Lovecraft and Robert W. Chambers to other genres — most often urban fantasy, in Miéville’s case. His presence as Reeves’ narrative collaborator on The Book of Elsewhere immediately makes it more interesting, even for those who aren’t already fans of the comic.
Because while BRZRKR is a hell of a thrill ride, it takes some doing to expand into a worthwhile novelistic experience. The story of an immortal warrior named Unute, or “B,” BRZRKR’s 12-issue narrative is an ultra-violent fable about a warrior-poet of sorts, an 80,000-year-old man with the might of a demigod in search of an end to his immortal condition. He doesn’t want to die, he repeatedly says; he just wants to be able to. To this end, Unute has struck a devil’s bargain with the United States government: He does dangerous black ops work for the military, and in exchange they get to study him to see if anything about his superhuman strength is replicable, as long as they also try and find a way to cure him.
It’s a very comic book-y story, depicted with unsparing brutality under Garney’s pen, but the three men who made it do the work to ensure it is also a thoughtful comic book-y story. The Book of Elsewhere doesn’t just transpose BRZRKR into a new medium, though. It’s more an entirely different take on the same basic premise, like seeing two stylistically different filmmakers adapt the same story.
Under Miéville, the stranger aspects of Reeves’ unkillable warrior take center stage. While its violent, in-medias-res opening may make the reader feel like they missed something, Miéville introduces Unute/B and his world as if BRZRKR didn’t exist. Different aspects of the story find new emphasis, and its plot centers on a strange new dilemma: a babirusa, or deer-pig, that is also immortal, just like Unute, and has followed him throughout his life.
It’s a thoughtful twist that allows Miéville to bring an Annihilation-esque flair to the world of BRZRKR, turning Unute’s immortality into something more like an eco-horror mystery, with a conspiracy thriller on the side. Chapters alternate between the main narrative and vignettes from throughout history, recounting people or places that Unute or the babirusa encountered, ruminating more deeply on the philosophical ideas of cyclical violence gestured at in the comic. And it’s worth repeating: I read The Book of Elsewhere before BRZRKR, and it stood alone just fine. In fact, being a fan of one of Reeves’ two takes on Unute’s story does not necessarily mean you will enjoy the other. This is a good thing, as both are distinct works reflective of the creators working with the raw material Reeves gives them.
In this, BRZRKR and The Book of Elsewhere mirror the actor’s career in cinema: Whether it’s in The Matrix or John Wick, Reeves excels in enabling fellow artists to bring their A game.
The Book of Elsewhere will be available July 23.
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