Matthew Buchholz's "Alternate Histories of the World"

Matthew Buchholz is a graduate of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts with a Bachelor’s Degree in Film & Television Production.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Alternate Histories of the World, and reported the following:

Perhaps it’s appropriate that Page 99 of Alternate Histories of the World is a full-page picture. My book alternates between over 90 full-page images of monsters, robots, and zombies rampaging through human history, and accompanying pages of descriptive text. It’s also a book that started from my online Alternate Histories store (AlternateHistories.com) which is entirely image-based.

Page 99 shows a recruiting poster for the Canadian Mounted Rifles “Monster Corps” (Canada’s Crack Calamity and Colossus Corp) - [Canada’s] First Line of Defence Against Monsters, Zombies, Aliens, and Other Unearthly Creatures.” In the picture an officer is seated on his horse using field glasses to spy on a UFO destroying a small town.

In the book, this Canadian Monster Corps plays a significant part in explaining why we don’t have monsters & zombies running around in modern times. I posit that the Canadians in the 1920s started this Monster Corps program and staffed it with battle-hardened veterans of World War I. These officers, later assisted by Mechanical Man Philip J. Gearsworthy, set up the beginnings of protocols designed to deal with outbreaks of the zombie virus, gigantic monsters smashing tall buildings, and robots rising up to destroy their creators.

In a later page of the book (pp. 104-105), I discuss the United States’ similar but more more extensive efforts after World War II, with the creation of the S.M.A.S.H. (Stop Monsters And Save Humanity) Squads who used these Canadian techniques and combined them with American technology, industry, and that can-do spirit. Eventually they managed to essentially wipe out the scourge of monsters, contain the zombie virus, and hold back alien invading forces.

The rest of my book deals with these monsters & creatures running rampant through our past, and these two pages are a feeble (if hopefully amusing) attempt to explain why you, the reader, were not aware that a robot helped to write the Declaration of Independence. Better to think of the book as a product of another universe, one where supernatural creatures roamed freely. An Alternate History, if you will.

Visit Matthew Buchholz's website, blog, Facebook page, and Twitter perch.

Read--Coffee with a Canine: Matthew Buchholz and Otis.

--Marshal Zeringue