Portals and Possibilities

Ruth Joffre reviews Debbie Urbanski’s story collection “Portalmania.”

By Ruth JoffreMay 13, 2025

• Fiction

• SF

A PORTAL IS a doorway between two worlds—one real and one magical—and going through the portal is a way of leaving the real world behind, if only for a little while. There are countless examples in literature: the wardrobe that transports the Pevensie children from war-torn England to the magical world of Narnia, the rabbit hole Alice falls down while following the White Rabbit to Wonderland, the tornado that sweeps Dorothy and Toto up from Kansas and deposits them in Oz. In all of these examples, characters go through the portal, explore the strange world on the other side, and come back changed (or, at the very least, with greater knowledge of themselves). This is the basic structure of the portal fantasy. Authors play with whether or not a character will return, when, and how often, but in the vast majority of examples, one key fact remains the same: a character goes through the portal. What happens, then, when one doesn’t?

In Debbie Urbanski’s new short story collection Portalmania, most of the main characters do not go through a portal. Some, like the protagonist of the collection’s opening story, “The Promise of a Portal,” desperately want to go but are unable to find a portal that will accept them. Portals have rules (who can go through them, how long they stay open, and so forth), and in this story, the rule is that everyone can see a portal but only one person can pass through it. When the wrong person approaches, the portal closes—a source of consternation for the first-person narrator, who wants nothing more than to leave her life and her children behind. She searches high and low for a way to escape, and when she finally finds a portal, she realizes it isn’t for her—it’s for her mother, who will not go. Portals keep appearing to her mother, but she keeps swatting them away, irritated by the very concept. After a surgery to remove a growth on her neck, the mother communicates via notes, writing in all caps: “YOU KNOW I NEVER LIKED FANTASY. IT ALWAYS FELT TOO MUCH LIKE ABANDONMENT, LIKE GIVING UP.” This is one of the earliest indications that the collection will eschew the traditions of the portal fantasy subgenre.

By focusing on characters who don’t go through portals, Urbanski suggests that the true narrative promise of a portal lies not on the magical side but on the “real” side. There, the consequences of a portal’s appearance are emotionally fraught and often devastating. The first-person narrator of “A Few Personal Observations on Portals,” a wife and mother, lives in a town whose population slowly depletes as its residents find and then go through their portals, never to return. She fears that her family will do the same. Her husband, son, and daughter all have portals, but she does not. Over one tense dinner, they discuss why, and the narrator theorizes that portals only appear to adults who can’t “grow up,” insisting that the portals are “an insult to all the work [she has] done to create a stable home.” Her husband does not object to being called immature or reject the implication that she alone created the stable home. Instead, he says that some people “will never have a portal because of who they are.” After his response, the narrator attempts to destroy her family’s portals, failing to damage her children’s but shattering her husband’s with one touch. Fantasy, Urbanski suggests, is a fragile thing, weakened by age and the realities of life. Children have the strength to escape, but adults, more often than not, are trapped.

Many of Urbanski’s short stories feature unhappy and abusive relationships. In some instances, they depict marriages in which the wife has realized that she is asexual and the husband cannot accept a marriage without sex. This situation first arises in “How to Kiss a Hojacki,” where a “Hojacki” is one of the many kinds of aliens into which people transform in the story. Narrated in close third-person perspective, the story follows Michael as he fails to adjust to his unnamed wife’s transformation into a Hojacki. One of the many physical changes she undergoes is a shrinking of her genitals, making intercourse very painful and bordering on impossible. Her mouth also shrinks, as if her lips have been sewn shut, and she communicates primarily via notes. In a series of torturous therapy sessions, she uses the notes to express her continued love for her husband, her discomfort with sex, and her belief that they can have a different kind of marriage, even as Michael insists that marriage must involve a schedule of robust and frequent sex. He eventually commits a violent act of marital rape. This provides an allegory for the experience of coming out as asexual in a marriage where sex is an expectation that cannot be negotiated. Many married asexual people are victims of sexual violence, and some of their marriages break up as a result. Few of Urbanski’s characters get to escape, however.

One notable exception is “The Dirty Golden Yellow House,” in which the first-person narrator is revealed as the author of “How to Kiss a Hojacki,” standing in as a partly fictionalized Urbanski. The narrator even quotes real (negative) reviews that people wrote about “How to Kiss a Hojacki” after its publication in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. One calls the story “an overlong underplotted offputtingly narrated story of a repugnant asexual wife and a repugnant husband and their repugnant relationship.” Others theorize that it’s an analogy for menopause or an exercise in catharsis, demonstrating a misunderstanding of the allegory and casting unfair judgments on the asexual wife, who is a victim of rape. The narrator rails against the reviews, spinning her reaction out into a gripping, meta narrative about violent revenge fantasies and the stark reality of marital rape, including the statistic that between 10 and 14 percent of married women experience it. The rage evident on every page, as well as Urbanski’s innovative structural choices, makes this the strongest story of the collection, the one that best represents the difficulty of (and aftermath of) escaping abusers. Unlike in “A Few Personal Observations on Portals,” no portal appears in this story to offer an easy, bloodless way out of a horrible situation. No portal appears at all.

Many of the stories in Portalmania are not, in fact, portal fantasies. Their plotlines often include magic or science fantasy, as in the alien transformations of “How to Kiss a Hojacki” or the AI sexbot of “Some Personal Arguments in Support of the BetterYou (Based on Early Interactions),” but these speculative concepts do not constitute “portals,” except in the most metaphoric sense. Rather, these stories fall into the category of “intrusion fantasy,” as posited by historian and writer Farah Mendlesohn in “Toward a Taxonomy of Fantasy” and expanded on in her 2008 book Rhetorics of Fantasy. As Mendelsohn writes, the “intrusive fantasy is usually set, often ostentatiously, in our world. In the intrusive fantasy the fantastic is the bringer of chaos. […] It takes us out of safety without taking us from our place.” In this light, one can argue that neither “The Promise of a Portal” nor “A Few Personal Observations on Portals” qualifies as a portal fantasy, but both are, instead, intrusion fantasies, wherein narrators contend with the consequences of magic appearing in the form of portals in otherwise realist worlds.

Other stories in the collection come closer to portal fantasies. “Long May My Land Be Bright” depicts the narrator entering a portal, but the story ends immediately after. “LK-32-C” does transport its main character, Luke, to a speculative world (of his own creation), but it does so via a spaceship that deposits him on the titular planet with a limited amount of food, thus eliminating the essential “portal” of portal fantasy and rendering the story, instead, science fiction.

Luke’s story, “Dispatches,” is part of the larger narrative of “LK-32-C,” which includes two other, longer sections: “Two Moons,” which comes before “Dispatches,” and “Reflection,” which follows it. “Dispatches” appeared as “LK-32-C” in The Kenyon Review, while “Two Moons” originally appeared in The Sun. For simplicity, I will refer to each section of “LK-32-C” by its subtitle and treat all of them as parts in conversation. In this context, it is important to note that “Dispatches” is narrated in the first person by Luke, but “Two Moons” is in the third person, and “Reflection” is narrated in the first person by Beth, Luke’s mother.

“Two Moons” begins as Beth and her husband Tom arrive for a parents’ day at Abbot Academy, where Luke is a student. Readers come to understand that this is a school for neurodiverse kids. Beth implies that Luke and the other students are potentially violent, recounting several outbursts, but given that Beth later admits to abusing Luke, it is difficult to assess the veracity of these claims. She might be exaggerating to protect herself, as abusers and unreliable narrators often do. Either way, it becomes clear that Beth cannot care for her autistic son. She can’t even say the word “autism.” In “Reflection,” she asks in exasperation, “Where in the indexes of my books should I have looked for help? Anger? Animals? Answer keys?” The list goes on, leading readers down the alphabet toward the word she dares not utter: “autism.” This passage encapsulates my frustrations with “Two Moons” and “Reflection.” Both refuse to speak plainly about the situation, instead relying on readers to “get it” while demonstrating distrust that they will. Such games are unnecessary and counterproductive if the story’s goal is to highlight the challenges of raising autistic children. This is doubly true when the story itself refuses to label the experience directly and recreates the logic of an abusive parent in service of a belated revelation that maybe she’s the villain of the story.

One could argue that “Dispatches,” sandwiched between two other parts and told from a different point of view, functions as a portal within the larger story of “LK-32-C.” It presents readers with a window into the mind of a young autistic boy who invents a planet where he can be alone, safe from his mother’s abuse and free to live on his own terms. This stands out because Urbanski rarely allows her stories to consider what it would mean for a marginalized person to be accepted on their own terms, and the collection suffers as a result. Imagine, for example, if “How to Kiss a Hojacki” were narrated from the wife’s point of view. How much more she could have said about asexuality, relationships, and alternative ways of expressing love that don’t involve sex. Personally, I would much prefer to read that story, just as I much prefer “Dispatches” to “Two Moons” and “Reflection.” Perhaps this is because I am too close to what should, on paper, be the collection’s ideal audience: a queer neurodiverse woman, not myself asexual or autistic but well versed in the challenges that these communities face, and also an avid reader (and writer) of speculative fiction. Having devoured Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children series, one of the best contemporary examples of portal fantasies, I picked up Portalmania expecting to love it. Instead, I encountered stories only tangentially about portals or fantasy, many of which recreated the violent and hateful points of view leveled against me and my communities daily.

By my count, only one of the stories in Portalmania qualifies as a portal fantasy: the final story, “The Portal,” a braided story combining Amber’s journey through a portal to the magical land of Mere and back with the narrator’s meta recollection of writing the story. Here, Urbanski-as-narrator returns, again telling her story as an asexual wife navigating sex with her husband, but this time she allows herself to escape through the portal. “I always knew it was wrong to call me desireless,” she writes. “Sometimes people have desires so strong that they can affect the shape of reality.” This story provides a welcome shift in perspective, but it comes too late in the book to sum up the experience. For that, I turn to the previous story, “Some Personal Arguments in Support of the BetterYou,” in which the narrator buys a sexbot for her husband, explaining that “instead of trying to make a life large enough to contain whatever we are, I believe it is okay to give that idea up, if one is tired, or old enough, or old and tired.” This is a perfectly valid sentiment. It’s also a limiting factor for the book as a whole. Most of Urbanski’s stories operate under the assumption that going through a portal (as a metaphor for choosing a different life, escaping a bad situation, and seeking acceptance for one’s identity) is a childish—and perhaps even narratively uninteresting—idea. In the end, Urbanski moves on from this belief, but what world exists beyond it we will never know. Portalmania doesn’t go there.