Keanu Reeves Wrote a Book. A Really Weird One

Alexandra Alter

Keanu Reeves doesn’t know exactly where the idea came from, but one day — sometime around the release of “John Wick: Chapter 2,” starring Keanu Reeves, and before he started shooting “The Matrix Resurrections,” also starring Keanu Reeves — he imagined a man who couldn’t die. “It became a series of what ifs,” he said. “What if they were 80,000 years old? Where did this character come from? What if they came from a tribe that was being attacked by other tribes and wanted to ask the gods for a weapon, and what if a god replied, and what if that birthed a half-human, half-god child?”

From there, Reeves added, “It went from this simple premise and gained in complexity and continued to grow.” For a while, the character only existed in Reeves’s head. Then he wondered, What if this immortal warrior became the basis for a comic book? An action movie? An animated series? “And then, there’s another what-if,” he said. “What if it became a novel?”

Reeves’s ancient warrior has since become the anchor of a growing multimedia franchise. The comic he imagined and co-wrote, BRZRKR (pronounced “berserker”), grew into a 12-issue series that has sold more than two million copies. A live-action film, starring and produced by Reeves, and an animated spinoff are in development at Netflix.

And now, Reeves is releasing his debut novel, “The Book of Elsewhere,” which he co-wrote with the British science fiction author China Mieville. Set in the world of the BRZRKR comic, “The Book of Elsewhere” is a mash-up of sci-fi, fantasy, historical fiction and mythology, with a heavy dose of existentialism.

To call it a weird book doesn’t begin to capture its genre-defying, protean strangeness. It centers on Reeves’s 80,000-year-old warrior — called Unute or sometimes B — who is freakishly strong, able to rip people’s arms off and punch through their chests, but has grown weary of his deathless state. It’s a pulpy, adrenaline-fueled thriller, but it’s also a moody, experimental novel about mortality, the slippery nature of time and what it means to be human.

At first, Reeves and Mieville might seem an odd pairing. Reeves is a movie star who has starred in billion-dollar action franchises like “The Matrix” and “John Wick,” as well as cult classics like the stoner time-travel comedy “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure” and the surfer crime thriller “Point Break.” Mieville is a Marxist who holds a doctorate in international relations from the London School of Economics. He’s known in literary circles for his heady, politically charged sci-fi and fantasy novels, among them “Kraken,” which features a squid-worshiping cult, and “Railsea,” set in a dystopian world that’s covered in railroad lines and populated by giant naked mole rats, which is both a homage to “Moby-Dick” and a critique of modern capitalism.

But from another angle, the Reeves/Mieville partnership makes aesthetic, cultural and even philosophical sense. Both pose mind-bending questions about the mysteries of existence in their work and often smuggle in those ideas through action-filled plots. Reeves grew up devouring science fiction by William Gibson and Philip K. Dick, and later came to love Mieville’s short stories, which he called “a wonder.” Mieville, for his part, loves how, in movies like “The Matrix” and “Johnny Mnemonic,” Reeves was able to “combine propulsion with astonishing spectacle, with heretical philosophical provocation and investigation.”

In a joint video interview, Reeves, from his home in Los Angeles, and Mieville, in Berlin, both used the word “preposterous” to describe how surreal it felt to work with the other. They spoke about their first meeting, in Berlin during the summer of 2021, in the giddy way a new couple talks about how they first got together.

“China, you were very prepared, which I really appreciated. He had a little book and a pencil, which I loved, I was like, yes,” Reeves recalled. “And he was like, I’m going to do a bad China” — he broke into a British accent, imitating Mieville — “‘I’ve been thinking, and I have a few questions for you.’ And I was like, please.” At the meeting, Reeves told Mieville that apart from a couple of key plot points and character traits that had been established in the comic, Mieville could do what he liked with the source material.

Reeves’s openness convinced Mieville that he would be able to write something narratively interesting, and deliver a book that didn’t feel like comic-book merch or a tie-in. “It was important to us approach this in a way that did something new, that did something that was very specifically literary in the sense of using the novel and using the novel form, that nonetheless was unabashedly and joyfully a BRZRKR novel and that honors the source material,” Mieville said.

As for why he wanted to write a novel, and how his literary projects intersect with his film career, Reeves had an answer that he apologetically acknowledged was “so obvious and reductive.” “It’s another version of storytelling, which I love,” he said.

One of his collaborators on the comic book series, Matt Kindt, has another theory about why Reeves has invested so much in the warrior character. He thinks Reeves, who has remained a rather enigmatic figure despite his decades in the spotlight, sees aspects of himself in the warrior — a figure who is worshiped and gains a cultlike following, but is lonely, treated as alien, burdened by other people’s misguided ideas about who he is. “I could tell it was a very personal story,” Kindt said.

In some ways, he added, the story seems like an oblique response to Reeves’s iconic roles in hyper-stylized action movies, as a larger-than life, invincible figure who kills again and again but can never die. Reeves said he didn’t realize at first how much of himself he was putting into the warrior character, but he’s since come to see how his metaphysical preoccupations shaped the story.