Interviews
Alan Robert Colors Outside the Lines With His “The Beauty of Horror 2” [Interview]
The world’s creepiest adult coloring book is getting a sequel.
Released by IDW Publishing last year, Alan Robert‘s adult coloring book “The Beauty of Horror” quickly shot to the top of Amazon’s bestseller list and caught the attention of many mainstream outlets. Now, with “The Beauty of Horror 2: Ghouliana’s Creepatorium, Another GOREgeous Coloring Book” arriving September 12th (pre-order it here), we caught up with him to talk about the book that features over 80 pages of original artwork depicting a variety of increasingly terrifying scenes and patterns.
Inside the pages of the follow-up book, undead girl Ghouliana mischievously attempts to trick budding colorists into unleashing a deadly spell. You’ll have to try and find the ingredients she’s sprinkled throughout Robert’s intricate pen and ink illustrations before it’s too late.
“Last year, right around April Fool’s Day, my wife and daughter were coloring in one of Johanna Basford’s books and asked me to join in,” Robert says leaning into his initial inspiration behind the book. “I had never seen an adult coloring book before and I was seriously impressed with how high-end the book was put together. The illustrations were intricate and beautifully drawn and the paper stock was fantastic. A lot different than coloring books I grew up with!
“The content itself was not really up my alley… lots of whimsical nature scenes and whatnot. But, I could definitely see why the adult coloring book thing got so huge.
“My wife said something like ‘you should really make one of these books,’ and that’s when my wheels started turning.
“Now, while I liked the idea of drawing my own adult coloring book, I didn’t want to draw something nature-based. I immediately wanted to draw the most disgusting thing I could think of. The first drawing ended up to be a detailed black and white version of CBGB’s bathroom (laughs). I actually posted it as a free download page on Facebook and hundreds of fans grabbed it overnight. They started coloring it in and posting their creations. It was so cool and inspiring to see so many different creative styles coloring in the same page. I really dug the interactivity of the whole thing.
“So after that, I pitched my adult coloring book idea to IDW. I decided that I wanted to create the ultimate horror coloring book, specifically made for colorists, because none had really existed before. Sure there were other coloring books with zombies, skulls, and stuff, but they were mostly books made up of pre-existing black and white comic art. And they were not high-end books. What I wanted to do was to achieve the same level of craftsmanship as the beautiful Johanna Basford books, but have the subject matter completely macabre, based on everything that had to do with the visuals of the horror genre. IDW said yes in about 10 minutes flat. It was the quickest green light I ever got from them! I had to ask them twice if they were joking because after all, I did pitch it to them on April Fool’s Day.”
Talking more about his inspiration: “I do my very best to include everything a horror fan would want to color. I made a checklist of topics and would generally draw a page each day. 88 pages per book to be exact! The first book has everything from vampires, werewolves, and zombies to killer clowns, undead pets, and haunted burial grounds. The second book may be even more unsettling! It has been called ‘The World’s Creepiest Adult Coloring Book’.”
Now that he’s covered all of the sub genre bases, Robert does think he could spin the first two books off into something fresh:
“I definitely have plans to tell stories using characters from ‘The Beauty of Horror’ series,” he revealed. “Not just in comics, but in other mediums, too. About halfway through the making of ‘The Beauty of Horror Vol. 1’, I came up with the Ghouliana character, and she really became the face of the series after that. Once I established her, I began expanding her world a bit, giving her creepy relatives, skeleton pets, and her own hidden room inside the haunted mansion. Volume 2 explores Ghouliana’s Creepatorium, which is her own private collection of oddities and bizarre creatures. It’s a lot of fun to draw.”
If you’re picking up a book yourself, Robert has a crayon suggestion: “You’re gonna need a shitload of red, buddy. (Laughs)”
Robert continues, speaking to his favorite books:
“I’ve always been really into psychological horror like ‘The Shining’, so I am very conscious to include visuals that have that little extra hidden detail you might not notice until after a few viewings. In both books, there are search and find games, where you literally have to comb each illustration to spot all of Ghouliana’s lost items.”
Fans of Robert know he’s also a talented bassist, part of Life of Agony. But before that, he was a serious art student:
“Long before I was making records and touring with Life of Agony, I was a serious art student at The School of Visual Arts in NYC, studying to be a professional cartoonist,” Robert reveals. “I attended on scholarship and had legendary ‘Thor’ artist, Walter Simonson, as my professor. LOA started while I was in college and we recorded our debut River Runs Red during my senior year. Upon graduation, I had to make a choice whether to pursue music or art. Well, the music thing was happening and I didn’t want to miss that opportunity to tour the world. I chose that journey, which lasted over two decades… and still going strong.
“My dreams of being a comic artist never died, though,” he continues. “If anything, it made me more hungry to achieve those goals. By 2010, I was absolutely determined to write, draw and publish the comic series I conceived of back in art school. It was a horror/conspiracy book called ‘Wire Hangers’. IDW offered to put it out and we continue to work together on a bunch of my creator-owned titles, including ‘Crawl to Me’ and ‘Killogy’. ‘The Beauty of Horror’ books have been the biggest hit of the bunch. The first coloring book turned out to be IDW’s #2 top seller of 2016.”
Outside of music and art, he has feature films in the works:
“Horror is in my DNA. I have a lot of ideas for more books in the works… but I am also adapting my titles into other mediums. For instance, ‘Crawl to Me’ is still being developed into a feature film. We’re at a very exciting stage with it, too. We’ll have some very cool announcements coming by the end of the year about that. Stay tuned.”
In regards to Life of Agony, it was a long wait for this year’s new album, A Place Where There’s No More Pain. He teases more plans for 2018.
“Twelve years is longer than most bands even stay together!” he exclaimed. “Seriously, though. We’re super proud of A Place Where There’s No More Pain and it just came out in April, so we are out on the road through the end of the year supporting it. More plans brewing for 2018.”
The first music video was inspired by Hellraiser; there could me more on the way:
“‘World Gone Mad’ is one of my favorite Life of Agony videos specifically because it’s so dark. We have a song on the new record that we’ve been playing live every night called ‘Dead Speak Kindly’. I would love to do another horror-themed music video for that one. We are definitely considering it.”
With horror in his DNA, Robert tells us his favorite horror films, which include The Shining, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, Psycho, Texas Chainsaw 2, Evil Dead 2, Day of the Dead, The Exorcist, Jaws, and of course Hellraiser.
Interviews
Paul Tremblay on Fighting AI with Horror in New Novel ‘Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep’
Paul Tremblay didn’t start his writing career believing he’d be battling machines over the sanctity of his job, but like so many writers of his generation, the battle found him. In the years since Large Language Models (LLMs) and neural networks started gaining traction as an advertised shortcut to creativity, Tremblay has been active in lawsuits to prevent the use of his works in training AI models, and he’s found that, with each new project, he has to consider the possibility that some LLM, somewhere, is going to latch on to what he’s creating.
“Now I feel like I’m thinking about, ‘Man, how am I going to write things that would be really hard or impossible for an AI to replicate?’,” Tremblay told me, speaking by Zoom from his home in Massachusetts. “Maybe some of that is ego. I’m sure every writer thinks, ‘Oh, an AI could never write what I write.’ Yes, I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t part of the thought process.”
While that’s something Tremblay might consider with any new work at this point in his career, the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of A Head Full of Ghosts, The Cabin at the End of the World, and many other novels and short stories tackled it in a more direct way with his latest book. Inspired by Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, and the quirky humor of the Coen Brothers, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is Tremblay’s attempt at a sci-fi-horror mash-up that’s both darkly funny and existentially nightmarish. It’s also, in his own words, a screed against the movement by AI companies to supplant human artists.
“I didn’t want to make it too didactic, but no, I playfully described this book as an anti-AI screed,” he said. “This book, in particular, was driven by anger and frustration, for sure. Not every book is going to be driven that way.“
Despite the emotions that fueled it, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep does not read like a screed. Instead, wielding offbeat humor and tech concepts that feel both lived-in and frighteningly tactile, the book lays out tandem narratives all building to the same conclusion, each of them exploring our relationship to machine learning in a different way. One of these narratives belongs to Julia, a former gaming streamer looking for a new challenge in life, who gets a call from a California tech company with an interesting offer.
Paul Tremblay in documentary series “First Word on Horror”
The company has, it seems, implanted some new technology in a brain-dead middle-aged man which will, in theory, allow them to pilot the man’s body through a rudimentary, still-developing system of controls. Julia, with her gaming background, would be the pilot, in her own way just as much a test subject as the human vegetable she’s controlling.
Julia is a Gen Z streamer with an omnivorous pop culture appetite, inspired by Tremblay’s own adult children, who riffs on The Big Lebowski constantly and calls her strange new meat puppet “Bernie” in reference to Weekend at Bernie’s. Her wide frame of reference, and her interest in art and stories far beyond video games, is in part informed by Tremblay’s own experiences with Gen Z, and in part a response to AI companies who scrape art and culture as a means of consuming it for reference without really experiencing a story.
“I know that one of the arguments that OpenAI and other tech companies are trying to make is like, ‘Hey, you writers, you artists, you take pop culture, you take your influences, and you create something. That’s just the same thing that the bots are doing.’ And it’s just not,” Tremblay said. “I wanted to have Julia have her outlook informed by all this pop culture, and I wanted to make that feel really human as a way to show how inhuman the AI is.”
The other side of the story belongs to “Bernie,” who’s addressed in his point-of-view chapters as “You.” In these chapters, the technology in Bernie’s body starts to flicker images through his seemingly dead brain, delivering half-remembered imagery and perspective in a nod to the “hallucinations” of an AI model groping for understanding it can never reach. These chapters in particular show off Tremblay’s flair for formalist shake-ups, and echo the kind of hyperstimulated writing that Dick and Ellison made so influential.
“I think it was more just the general Philip K. Dick feeling of ‘The world is so strange,'” Tremblay said. “He’s a lot funnier, I think, than maybe a lot of people credit him. That’s definitely what I was thinking of when writing the book.“
Bernie’s chapters embody the strangeness of Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep, presenting imagery that’s at times puzzling, at times eerily filmic, and always unnerving. They also mirror Julia’s own journey in fascinating ways as the odd couple – the Gen Z gamer and the middle-aged vegetable – traverse the United States, and the tech in Bernie’s body wakes up to the possibilities of using his flesh for its own purposes. It’s a compelling narrative technique, but it presented some new writing challenges for Tremblay.
“I quickly realized I couldn’t write this book the same way I have in the past,” he said. “By that, I mean all my other novels I had written in the order in which it was presented, even things that are nonlinear, which is most of them. I knew I couldn’t do that in this book. It’s not a spoiler, but hopefully the readers figure out pretty early that the Bernie chapters are a little bit of a preview of the next chapter from Julia, what’s actually happening with Julia. It’s all refracted from him.”
Mary Roach’s Stiff
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep began with a simple image, inspired by Tremblay’s reading of Mary Roach‘s book chronicling the history of our treatment of corpses, Stiff. As he read, Tremblay imagined a body sitting on an airplane, remote-controlled by someone else. At the time, it was a “silly what-if” concept, filed away in his head. Years later, when he became an author suing a tech company to keep AI from scraping his work for ideas, it started to feel frighteningly plausible, taking the “silly what-if” into the territory of a high-concept horror show about what happens when we try to exploit and commodify uniquely human aspects of consciousness.
“It stuck with me,” Tremblay said of that what-if imagery. “And then a few years later, when I was a part of the case suing OpenAI on behalf of writers, that what-if suddenly didn’t seem as silly. The more I learned about how that corporation operates and without really any sort of ethical thought to anything, I was like, ‘Oh, I’m going to play with that. That’s actually happening.”
So, what if someone actually in favor of generative AI picks up Tremblay’s self-described “anti-AI screed?” He hopes that, at the very least, he’s made the ride enjoyable in a distinctly human way that might begin to reshape the conversation.
“I think that was another reason why I wanted to have the humor,” Tremblay said. “If people are reading this book who aren’t on the side of like, ‘Hey, LLMs taking authors’ books is bad,’ maybe if they read something that’s cut with some humor, that maybe they’ll be more easily swayed.”
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is now in bookstores everywhere.
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