Few novels have generated as much effusive praise from me as Debbie Urbanski’s After World, a heart-wrenching, powerful tale of environmental apocalypse. It’s unsurprising, therefore, to find myself reacting similarly to the author’s first collection, Portalmania (2025), which gathers ten potent stories mixing the fantastical with the devastatingly real.
The thematic throughline for Portalmania is, well, portals — both as a genre trope and as metaphor, resulting in inventive speculative stories encoded with unflinching human insight. “The Promise of a Portal” leads the way, a thought-provoking inversion of the child-abduction cautionary tale that imagines a young girl who wants to be taken — and explores the reasons why. Most of the stories possess a similar sense of longing for alternate circumstances, worlds where conditions could be different. In “A Few Personal Observations on Portals,” for example, portals spotaneously manifest for many people in a small town as nebulous intimations of their hopes, dreams, or perhaps unmet needs — an escalating phenomena that has a straining effect on the protagonist’s relationships. “Long May My Land Be Bright” memorializes divisive American politics by imagining a dual-presidency scheme whereby opposition leaders take turns leading the country on alternate days – a scathing satire of our poisonous dichotomy. “How to Kiss a Hojacki,” meanwhile, posits a world in which people transform into fantastical creatures, and how those metamorphoses — not well tolerated by “normal” people — cause discord amongst friends and family members. Indeed, a recurring theme involves the toxic lengths mainstream society will go to inflict normative standards on people, often to their psychological detriment. This is most frequently seen in a series of stories about the challenges of being asexual in a world systemically unsympathetic to asexuality, most powerfully realized in “The Dirty Golden Yellow House.”
The focus on strained relationships and tortured psychology will no doubt prove troubling for some readers, but Urbanski brings both calm empathy and persuasive fury to her devastating observations, which are quite often also jaggedly humorous and deftly metafictional. It’s a collection that gripped me completely, and I hope it’s the first of many.
