Crenshaw's Books & Decks

Deep Dark Fears is an imaginary catalogue of human fears, worries and nightmares.

Deep Dark Fears is another Tumblr's web comic strip  turned into book. Krause started drawing his own fears and then readers began contributing theirs. So, what sort of fears can you find here? Adult's fears. Children's fears. Ghost fears. Doppelganger fears. Aliens fears. Death fears. Toilet fears. Cute fears. Gory fears. Religious fears. Church fears. If you have any sort of irrational worry or fear it might be here.

The book is interesting not only because of the irrationality and interest of the fears described per se, but also from a psychological point of view as it becomes a sort of visual catalogue of the "horrors" of the subconscious.

I love Krause's mastery at creating a story in four or six vignettes, his wonderful sense of colour and mood, his landscapes and chiaroscuro, his black and white and his watercolours. The colour and style change from one fear to another to suit the story.  The book is visually varied, aesthetically pleasing, and very entertaining. I love the winks to the reader in some of the pages, with tiny-winy characters and objects drawn at the bottom end of some pages.

Krause is good enough to acknowledge all the contributors of the dreams at the end of the book.I would rather have them mentioned at the end of each fear. On the other hand, many of the contributors are anonymous, so that is just my preference, and nothing really important.

I super loved the book, I wanted more. More fears. More varied. Why not more? Business? 

The book is In most lists of best graphic books of the 2015. I do love the book but I am not sure I would include it in one. Yet, you don't need to buy it. You need to go to Krause's Deep Dark Fears Tumblr of the same name. According to him, 50 of the fears are unpublished, and the others are favourite ones in tumblr. Well, there are many more unpublished stories in the web than published in the book. Put it that way. If you, like me, read graphic books on digital format, the website is way better than any Kindle format for reading comic strips. Having said that, the rendering of the images and the colouring looks way better in Kindle. 

This is one of those books that would be worth having in paper. And I would say that makes a perfect coffee table book for hypters and comic lovers.