Halloween and metal go hand in hand. Who among us doesn’t fill our Halloween playlists full of dark and ominous heavy metal standards? Slayer’s “Raining Blood,” Type O Negative’s “Black No. 1,” literally any Cannibal Corpse track—let’s face it, it’s not really Halloween if you’re not hearing some big riffs and menacing lyrical depictions of evil deeds. So it only makes sense that a metal musician would be a natural candidate for creating vivid visual illustrations of horror as well.
On this week’s episode of our heavy metal talk show Last Words, hosts Jordan Olds (Two Minutes To Late Night), Katy Irizarry (Season Of Mist), and Doc Coyle (Bad Wolves/Ex Man Podcast) get their hands dirty with Life of Agony bassist Alan Robert, who in recent years has had a successful side hustle as the creator of a spooky anthology of books. In 2016, Robert released The Beauty of Horror, coloring book that combined one of our favorite activities as kids with the brutality and gore of supernatural horror and slasher flicks. He’s since released three more volumes, the most recent, The Beauty of Horror IV, having just been released in September, as well as a companion tarot deck. Though he admits that he tends to view Halloween, itself, as amateur night.
“Every day is Halloween around here. I leave it to the rookies on Halloween,” he says, adding that he actually got into monsters and illustration well before he started playing music. “For me, I started music really late, I only picked up a guitar at 16, 17, but I was drawing since I’m like six. That’s all I ever did was draw my own comic books and sit at the lunch table and draw monsters. That’s all I was about, 24-7. Especially when Star Wars came out, and all these cool creatures to draw. I was infatuated with everything monster related.”