Alice Cooper is finally telling his own story, on his own terms. ‘Devil on My Shoulder,’ published by Penguin Books on October 8, is the definitive autobiography from the Godfather of Shock Rock, a full accounting of six decades in music, myth, addiction, survival, and faith from one of the most singular figures rock has ever produced. After sixty-plus years of embellishments, elaborations, and outright fabrications circling his name, Cooper is sorting reality from legend himself.
The book covers everything. The slaughtered chickens. The bans and record burnings. The blackout years and the creative process fueled by alcohol, drugs, and round-the-clock television. His feelings of guilt after people got hurt or died. How he stayed married for half a century. And, perhaps most surprisingly, God. “I just want to describe how it is that I found Him dwelling in me,” Cooper writes. That is not a sentence anyone saw coming from Alice Cooper, and that unpredictability is precisely what makes this book essential reading.
The autobiography traces the full arc of a career built on over 50 million albums sold, a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and a 2011 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction. His catalog includes platinum landmarks from ‘Killer’ and ‘School’s Out’ through ‘Billion Dollar Babies’ and ‘Trash.’ His collaborators have included Vincent Price, Aerosmith, Guns N’ Roses, Jon Bon Jovi, and Johnny Depp, with whom he co-founded Hollywood Vampires alongside Joe Perry. His 2025 album ‘The Revenge Of Alice Cooper’ reunited the surviving original band members to widespread critical acclaim.
Cooper has been covered by Etta James, The Smashing Pumpkins, and Megadeth. He appeared in Wayne’s World, The Muppets, That 70s Show, and starred alongside John Legend and Sara Bareilles in NBC’s Jesus Christ Superstar Live in Concert. The reach of this man’s career across popular culture is genuinely staggering, and ‘Devil on My Shoulder’ promises to account for all of it.
This is the book rock fans have been waiting decades for, written by the only person qualified to tell it.