Portalmania

Urbanski (After World) delivers a quietly haunting collection of nine speculative shorts that employ the recurring motif of portals to other worlds to explore themes of loss, longing, and transformation. The narrator of “The Promise of a Portal,” a chilling meditation on desire and consent, revisits childhood memories of girls from her neighborhood who vanished into mysterious vans and returned changed. “A Few Personal Observations on Portals” follows a woman as she navigates her disintegrating family’s obsession with portals, probing the tension between responsibility and escape. In “Hysteria,” a less obviously portal-centric story, a woman’s therapy session spirals into a surreal interrogation of trauma, repression, and the monstrous within. Urbanski’s prose is both clinical and intimate, grounding high-concept ideas in emotionally precise psychological realism. Throughout, portals function less as escapes than as mirrors, revealing each character’s private ache. The result is a sharp, off-kilter collection that uses the uncanny as a lens for deeply human concerns. Agent: Kate Garrick, Salky Lit Management. (May)