Books of 2026: PORTALMANIA: STORIES by Debbie Urbanski.
Well! This is the most deeply sex-repulsed asexual collection I've read in my life!! I picked it up because hello, portals?, and the asexuality was a much-appreciated bonus for me. (Shout out to @aroaessidhe for putting it on my ace radar!)
It's also, however, one of the most (intentionally) challenging collections I've ever read--absolutely nothing in here is sunshine and rainbows. I've been having a hard time wrapping words coherently around my thoughts, so I wound up with list of adjectives: brutal, unflinching, unsettling, uncanny, distant, dissociative, disallusionment, domestic, familial, intimate, violent. The stories in here are about escape and the possibility of escape and the rejection of the possibility of escape; about families and stability and suffocation and failures of family; about longing and discomfort and monsters and fear and resignation.
I appreciated the major recurrent perspective: slightly older women, wives and mothers, who realized After they started families that they're ace (and almost unilaterally sex-repulsed). It's an important voice, and one I haven't encountered much in fiction yet--props to Urbanski for leaning into it hard.
"Favorite" seems like a hell of a choice when describing my relationship to any of the stories in here. The ones that stuck with me most are:
"A Few Personal Observations on Portals"
"The Dirty Golden Yellow House"
"Some Personal Arguments in Support of the BetterYou (Based on Early Interactions)"
Overall, it's a very dark and fucked up collection (lots of coercive sex and marital rape), with glimmering portals of Something Else shimmered throughout. Urbanski's narrative voice is rock fucking solid, and it does fascinating things to the collection's tone (not quite cognitive dissonance, but close?? The voice is certainly A Choice, and a good one, but descriptions are failing me). It does make all the stories kind of bleed together--these feel more like microvariations on a theme than a sweeping collection--but if you vibe with it, this collection will have Much For You. (Her short fiction has been pubbed in many a magazine, so you can probably find her online for a sampler.)
