Portalmania

By Debbie Urbanski: Paperback; 320 pages / English[Simon & Schuster]

If you could go anywhere, where would you go? And what happens to the people you leave behind? From the author of After World comes a genre-busting collection of stories that reveal our lives in a startling new light, perfect for fans of Kelly Link and Carmen Maria Machado In Portalmania, Debbie Urbanski wields sci-fi, fantasy, horror, and realism to build a dark mirror that she holds up to the ordinary world. Within the sharply imagined landscape of this collection, portals appear in linen closets, planetary gateways materialize in boarding schools, monsters wait in bathroom vents, and transformations of women’s bodies are an everyday occurrence. Political division causes physical rifts that break apart the Earth’s crust. A son on another planet sends dispatches home to the mother who failed him, and a wife turns to the supernatural to escape her abusive marriage.