It’s fair to say that I’ve got previous when it comes to portals. Since writing 7,000 words about portal fantasy stories as a means of exploring my feelings about moving to America, I’ve reread “The Faery Handbag” by Kelly Link (2004), about an immigrant who carries around a portable portal. I’ve read “The Sound of Children Screaming” by Rachael K. Jones (2023), which uses a portal fantasy conceit to evoke the systemic cruelty of the United States. And now I’ve read Portalmania, the new short story collection by Debbie Urbanski. First written between 2015 and 2022, the ten stories in this collection evidence deep thinking about the possibilities of the portal fantasy. In H. G. Wells’s classic portal story, “The Door in the Wall” (1906), the narrator is unable to decide whether the man who finds the titular door is “the possessor of an inestimable privilege, or the victim of a fantastic dream.” Urbanski’s protagonists are often both; in these densely metafictional stories, portals offer radical transformations, but always at a devastating cost.

Many of these stories feature conventional portals: openings in our reality that lead to other worlds. However, these are not conventional portal fantasies. Rather than offering straightforward executions of the format, these stories dwell in the knotty, ambiguous spaces surrounding their portals, similar to the works of contemporary fantasists such as Link or Karen Russell. Like these authors, Urbanski is often willing to be expressly metafictional. In “A Few Personal Observations on Portals,” the narrator makes explicit what is implicit in many portal fantasy stories, remarking at one point: “Here’s an observation: a person’s portal generally reflects some aspect of their personality.”

This metafictionality allows Urbanski to turn ambivalence about the portal fantasy genre into a source of horror. The narrator of “A Few Personal Observations on Portals” lives in a town whose residents begin discovering their own personal portals. At first, she is judgemental: “[I]t seemed to me that portals appeared only to unhappy people.” This critique of escapism manifests in the townspeople’s entrancement with their portals. When a neighbour’s portal appears on the narrator’s front porch, the neighbour just sits there, gazing into its depths. The narrator comments, “[e]ven I could see how her actual life was becoming a boring story compared to the potential narrative that the portal offered.” The narrator considers herself above such self-centred escapism. But then, a portal appears for her husband. Then, ones for her children.

As readers of portal fantasy, we know what to expect. A portal has been placed upon the mantelpiece; someone will go through it by the end of the third act. Here, the narrator’s fear is vividly rendered, again by means of metafiction: “I think it’s any parent’s instinct to try and keep our children away from things that might take them to other worlds where we aren’t allowed to follow.” But when the children do eventually leave (never to return, of course), the lit crit takes a back seat to vividly observed details. I was especially struck by the daughter’s departure:

I reached for her but it was like reaching for a picture. There was nothing to hold on to. She smiled at me. It was the kind of smile she used when somebody was taking her photo. “Please,” I said. This must have been the wrong thing to say. What should I have said? She dove the rest of the way through, her orange elephant backpack hanging off one shoulder.

Many critics, such as Bernard Bergonzi and J. R. Hammond, read portal fantasies as metaphors for the seductive folly of youth, or the abandonment of adult concerns. Here we see the other side of such fantasies, realised with shocking brutality. The detail of the orange elephant backpack hits particularly hard, indicating the naïveté of the narrator’s daughter even as she feels mature enough to make her own way in a strange new world.

This eye for heartbreaking details is a common feature of Urbanski’s stories. In “The Promise of a Portal,” the portal fantasy is mashed up with a “stranger danger” panic. The protagonist feels a perverse jealousy towards those of her peers snatched up by “portal creepers” in their sinister white vans:

Leslie climbed inside willingly, even eagerly. There was a mattress on the floor of the van, as well as a camp chair, and a bag of books, and a puppy. No one believed that I saw the bag of books and the puppy.

Even in a story where the existence of other worlds is taken for granted, children still aren’t believed about their own experiences. In “The Dirty Golden Yellow House,” a pact with a witch is sealed with a smear of blood on the hem of a dress. “The blood will stain,” the protagonist says. “Well, that’s where the power comes from,” the witch replies. At the more absurd end of the spectrum, in “LK-32-C,” a woman receives a letter from her autistic son, who is away at a “therapeutic boarding school.” When she opens the letter, she finds a blank sheet of paper. On calling the school, she is told: “It sounds to me as if your child wanted to send you a piece of paper.” These details give a sense of texture to Urbanksi’s stories, which reliably feel if not lifelike then certainly lived in. Even as the stories repeat similar themes and character archetypes, each entry offers a distinct approach and set of images.

One recurring subject throughout the book is asexual identity, specifically the experience of a married woman coming out as asexual to her husband, who nonetheless expects her to continue having sex with him. The passages concerning sexual coercion are among the most horrifying in the book. In “Hysteria,” the protagonist meets with a therapist who challenges her statement that she is being raped by her husband. “Do you think everybody should hate intercourse and penetration because you do?” asks the therapist. “No,” she replies, as if that was ever the point. In “Some Personal Arguments in Support of the BetterYou (Based on Early Interactions),” a woman purchases an artificial recreation of herself that will have sex with her husband for her. “Her face wore a needy and agreeable look, an expression I haven’t seen on my own face. There was no sign of my discomfort, or disgust, or boredom.” This is a distressing subject, and one Urbanski consistently treats with clarity and nuance. In a welcome additional touch, her story notes provide an extensive list of further reading on the subject.

Not every story is a triumph, however. “Long May My Land Be Bright” is an unsubtle satire of polarisation in US politics, in which the metaphorical rifts between people manifest as literal rifts in space. There are some amusing details, including the idea of two presidents who govern on odd and even days; but the story too readily accepts the premise that polarisation is in fact the problem in American politics, rather than an empowered and increasingly violent far right movement. Towards the story’s end, the narrator observes a snowfall:

I stood by the window. I could see Mrs. Slevensky standing beside the window in the back of her house and Mr. Granell standing beside his window. Between us the snow twirled around itself, around an invisible center.

You will forgive me, dear reader, if these days I find myself with little patience for the idea of unification around a centre, invisible or otherwise.

Yet while the collection’s political thinking is disappointingly basic, Urbanski is very thoughtful about the tropes of the fantasy genre, and about Portalmania’s construction as a book. I mentioned earlier that the collection contains ten stories, yet the table of contents lists only nine. Tucked away behind the story notes and the acknowledgements is a final “Coda,” a story about a mother whose daughter transforms into an otherworldly bird creature. “You were beautiful when you flew, your sinuous, veined wings extended for the first time, your blue-green skin trailing behind you.”

As metaphors for a parent accepting their child’s independence go, it’s a pretty good one. But the story is also notable for how it complicates, and seemingly rejects, the entire collection’s conceit. In a final metafictional move, the narrator reflects:

When I was your age, everyone I knew wanted to go through a portal. I did too. We were always looking for circlets of gold energy strung in a tree or a curtain of beaded light tucked under the stairs. But lately I’ve been wondering if such a definition of escape, a definition that has been around for centuries, has become an outdated idea. Why should you have to leave? You are already doing impossible things. Let the world, this world, I imagine you demanding of the world, expand to encompass every part of you.

The portal fantasy can be an effective taunt to the drabness of consensus reality. There is a world elsewhere! it whispers seductively. Yet our experiences of life need not always be retreated from. In some cases, they must not be. I plan on staying in the US, on confronting the violence, cruelty, and general depravity of my new home. I plan on letting this country accommodate me, and frankly, it’s lucky to have me. In Portalmania, Debbie Urbanksi reminds us that, whether inestimable privilege or fantastic dream, the portal fantasy is only one among many. Those other fantasies are equally deserving of a nuanced, thoughtful treatment as the act of walking through an otherworldly door.