by Sharon P-Y

Have you ever worried that you’ll trip and fall and inadvertently bite your tongue off? Or that you’ll sneeze so hard with your eyes open that your eyes will pop right out of your head? Do you ever secretly worry that there could be invisible people in your bathroom?  

In Deep Dark Fears and the follow-up collection The Creeps, cartoonist and illustrator Fran Krause brings some of our greatest — and some of our silliest — fears to life in charming ink and watercolor comics. 

Some might recognize the concept from Krause’s popular web comic “Deep Dark Fears,” which continues to run on his Tumblr and Instagram accounts. Readers, sometimes anonymously, submit their occasionally bizarre and often relatable fears for Krause to illustrate, typically in a classic four-panel comic strip. The result is a delightful mix of the macabre and the comical. 

In one comic, Krause depicts a reader’s secret fear that all of life is a simulation. In another, our protagonist admits to wondering if there are hidden cameras in public automatic-flush toilets that snap clandestine photos of every visitor. Finally, in a surprisingly heart-wrenching turn, a particularly memorable vignette follows the ghost of a dead dog who has returned to their owner, who can’t see them, leaving the ghost pup to wonder why they’re being ignored. (If reading that doesn’t send a chill down your spine and make you go and hug your pet, nothing will.) 

There are also the laugh-out-loud funny fears: being told as a kid that the steam rising from the pork dish you were served for dinner is just the pig’s ghost floating away, or that if you eat candy in bed at night, ants will crawl into your ears while you’re sleeping and build a colony in your head. 

Embrace your fears — and maybe even discover a few new ones — and borrow one of Krause’s collections from the Library today. 

Deep Dark Fears is available in print, as is The Creeps.

Sharon Pruitt-Young is an Instructor and Research Specialist at East Columbia Branch. Aside from books, she is passionate about writing, urban sketching, trees, and art of all kinds.