APHIDS on roses and blind rabid kittens, a mother who forces her kid to wear mittens, grown men who proudly wear their high school rings these are a few of my least favorite things, and they would all be good in a book. In literature, far greater hay has been made from the world's unpleasantries than from its delights, as anyone who's had a date with both "Pollyartia" and "Lolita" can tell you. A recent crop of picture books turns over the world's rocks and peers underneath them, and the results are unnerving, mostly (though not exclusively) in a good way. Emily Gravett has been stretching and ripping at the boundaries of picture books since her first, "Wolves," in which the book is attacked by the claws and teeth of its title. Following the lead of Lane Smith, her books become participants in the story, with flaps and folds, rips and shreds, scribbles in the margin and bites on the bar code - although her best, "Orange Pear Apple Bear," is relatively unadorned. With the illustrations absolutely unfettered and the text every which way, there's something about the physicality of her work that makes it not quite a picture book, in the way that Robert Rauschenberg's constructions aren't quite paintings. (As with Rauschenberg, there are those who say Gravett's work isn't really for children. Curiously, these critics tend to be over 18 and thus have no way of knowing.) In her new book, Gravett invents a coauthor, one who is not content just to ride her coattails but scratches her name off the cover: Little Mouse. Like Gravett, Mouse is a visual artist. "Each page in this book," Gravett explains, "provides a large blank space for you to record and face your fear using a combination of drawing, writing, collage." Little Mouse needs no further encouragement and races through the pages, each headed with a specific phobia, like entomophobia (fear of insects) and musophobia (oh, look it up yourself), filling in blank space with maps, Polaroids, sketches, grime and increasingly hysterical testimony. Although the text is iffy at times - "I get edgy near sharp knives" - the visuals are endlessly startling and fascinating. I keep running my hands along this book's pages, trying to find the boundaries of what Gravett has devised. The pamphlet folds out, but the feathers merely look real; only when you turn the page do you realize that the figure of the dog, composed from torn photographs of dogs and cats, fits into the shadow of the mouse on the next page. The book's message - that everyone is afraid of something - almost gets lost in the shuffle, but "Little Mouse's Big Book of Fears" still does a splendid job of re-enacting phobia: it's hard to look away. The dock struck 1 and - yikes! From "Little Mouse's Big Book of Fears." Next to Gravett's book, "The Little Bit Scary People," written by Emily Jenkins and illustrated by Alexandra Boiger, can't help seeming a little bit conservative, which isn't fair. After all, "little bit" is right there in the title: this book doesn't gaze into the darkness of real fear but takes a few peeks around the neighborhood, finding the punk kid skateboarding with his boombox and the school nurse holding out the stinging antiseptic. Each person is briefly profiled, and then the unnamed narrator imagines a secret life for each of them: "But I bet," she says of the cafeteria lady, "when school gets out, she goes for a jog, listening to show tunes on her headphones. She sings as loud as she can and doesn't care if people hear." Boiger's illustrations have a nice, quick flow, particularly her two-page spreads, with the redheaded narrator folded into the action of her imaginings. All the lines are curvy, giving the book a lithe feel that even survives the atrocious font chosen for the word "scary," presumably the fault of the designer, Elizabeth H. Clark. (Pray tell, what is that? Hideous Distressed?) Jenkins's text, however, wants to take all the fun out of fear. Surely every schoolchild's fantasies about what the principal does when nobody's looking are a little more dire than "she takes dancing lessons with her boyfriend and really, really shakes it loose." If these people's secret lives are so fulfilling, why on earth aren't they kinder in real life? "Some people are a little bit scary," the book concludes - there's that font again! - "but then, sometimes (most times, maybe, I think), sometimes they really are not." This is not a little bit scary; this is the least scary a book can be. It's something like thinking that hiding underneath the bed is a grocer named Ted who enjoys knitting. The creature underneath the bed, properly tentacled and threatening, is precisely - let me get out my calculator - onetwelfth the plot of Marry Kelley's "Twelve Terrible Things," which makes no distinction between the terribleness of losing one's ice cream - the first of the 12 - and death. This seems sound. Each horror, from the dentist to the clown, is rendered in one stark line of dialogue ("This must be our new student") and a two-page, first-person spread. Kelley's near-realist illustrations are confrontational; the hands of the cheek-pinching grandmother seem to clutch the lapels of your humble critic, and the close-up of the bad haircut looks positively chemotherapeutic. The death is that of a goldfish, buried at toilet, and when you turn the page another watery fate, seen from high atop a diving board, awaits the reader. Calamity after calamity strikes, with no reason and no escape - this cafeteria lady is most certainly not a jogging show-tuner - even at the end of the book, which gives us One Pleasant Thing as a seeming respite. But no. It is an ice cream cone. Which will be dropped at the start of the book. It is an endless, anxious loop, like fear, or life itself. Have a nice day. Daniel Handler's latest book is "The Lump of Coal," written under the name Lemony Snicket.

Under the guise of a self-help book whose instructions are obediently followed by a mouse taking notes on the pages, Gravett takes readers on an intense exploration of fear. Each page features one phobia. Carrying a full-sized (not mouse-sized) pencil, Little Mouse confronts various angsts (clinophobia, fear of going to bed; ablutophobia, fear of bathing), some tweaked for mouse-relevance (aichmophobia becomes fear of knives, as a circus is cancelled due to an unfortunate incident with a farmer's wife). Most existential are whereamiophobia (fear of getting lost) and isolophobia (fear of solitude and, here, fear of the darkness of a solid-black page). Creative multimedia artwork with a frenetic vibe includes collage, foldouts (maps, newspapers), cutouts (nibbled page corners abound) and expressive and aptly wild pencil strokes. Myriad details--such as a receipt on the back cover listing the book's condition as "Poor, scribbled in, rodent damage"--reinforce the setup. Timorous Mouse doesn't vanquish the worries but does weather the dangers, revealing a tiny final smile at an unexpected turnabout. (Picture book. 3-7) Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Dystychiphobia, phagophobia, good old acrophobia: everybody's afraid of something--although it does seem that Gravett's (Orange Pear Apple Bear) winsome mouse protagonist has cornered the market on anxieties. Wittily assuming the format of a scrapbook or diary that is filled in by Little Mouse, this book exhorts, "You too can overcome your fears through the use of art!" A virtually encyclopedic list of fears follows, each on its own page, with plenty of space allotted for Little Mouse's response. Gravett augments these expansive collaged spreads with interactive goodies (a flap, a gatefold, a tip-in of an entire map). For example, when Little Mouse scrawls, "I don't like being alone, or in the dark," readers will learn from glancing at the upper-right corner that this feeling is called "Isolophobia (Fear of solitude)." The opposite page is pitch-black, and Little Mouse eyes it nervously. Other moments are more purely amusing: "aichmophobia" (the fear of knives) ushers in references to "Three Blind Mice." Whether or not they choose to face their own fears, kids will feel that a chord has been struck--and they'll savor spicing up their budding vocabularies. Ages 4-8. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(Primary) An opening note welcomes the reader to a self-help book called Emily Gravett's Big Book of Fears and recommends using the book's supposedly blank pages to "record and face your fear" via art and writing. But Little Mouse, pencil in paw, has gotten here first; readers follow him as he climbs, draws, quivers, and collages his way through the book in hand, scrawling out his anxieties on pages labeled "Isolophobia (Fear of solitude)" and "Whereamiophobia (Fear of getting lost)." The hapless mouse fears everything from heights to going to bed, but there's consolation in the end: as we see someone's feet leap onto a chair, he cheekily proclaims, "She's afraid of ME!" The visual and texual layers woven by Gravett's meticulous mixed-media illustrations blur the lines between the book and the mouse and his creations, and contain enough detail that multiple reads still won't reveal everything. Nursery rhyme references are familiar but fresh; nibbled pages and foldouts elegantly bridge fiction and reality. This clever book will engage and amuse kids and their grownups -- though perhaps not the faint of heart. From HORN BOOK, (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.