In what may be the wildest celebrity collaboration of the year, film star Keanu Reeves has teamed up with weird-fiction writer China Miéville to produce The Book of Elsewhere, a novel about a warrior who cannot die. It is based on the BRZRKR comic series Reeves created in 2021 with Matt Kindt and Ron Garney, and follows the same 80,000-year-old protagonist known as Unute, or just B. 

B has slaughtered his way through the millennia. Very occasionally, someone manages to kill him, whereupon he is reborn from an egg formed out of his flesh. In the present day, he works with a United States black-ops group, killing whomever they instruct him to kill while they conduct research to try to solve his deathlessness. He sometimes kills his colleagues by accident, though he usually apologises for this. He would like to be able to die – not immediately, just sometime. The reader will unavoidably picture him as Reeves, who will play him in a Netflix adaptation.

This is Reeves’s first novel and Miéville’s tenth. Those expecting the inventiveness of the latter’s The City & The City (2009) or Embassytown (2011) will not find it here: the motif of undying super-soldier battling through the ages is overplayed. Nevertheless, the writing is delightfully abstruse and densely allusive, as