The Best Portal Fantasy Books

What is portal fantasy?

Portal fantasy is any story in which characters leave one world to enter another. Often it’s our world that they leave behind, but not always, as we’ll see in my choices. This is distinct from purely secondary-world fantasy books, which take place in a single alternative world; and also from intrusion fantasy, where magic enters into our own world instead.

There’s a particular yearning that I think portal fantasy really speaks to – the feeling that there is more to reality, and that we could slip away into it, if we could only find the right direction to move in. It feels a bit like what we do when we really immerse ourselves in a story, too. It’s incredibly appealing.

From a more technical perspective, it’s a handy device because it means the main character is also new to the world, and will have questions about it. If you like your fantasy worlds well explained, but without improbable info-dumping, a portal fantasy will probably tick your boxes.

Your first choice is from one of the best-known fantasy series of all time, but despite being the first book chronologically, it isn’t the one we all know. The events in C.S. Lewis‘s The Magician’s Nephew take place before the events of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, is that right?

Yes. It was written later, but in the timeline it comes first. I prefer it, and I think it’s criminally underrated.

Polly and Digory are neighbours and friends, and they are exploring the attics joining their houses, when they realise that they have accidentally found a way into the forbidden study of Digory’s uncle. I think a lot of good portal fantasy starts with something that feels like it should lead to another world – anyone who explored a strange, liminal, slightly-off-limits space as a child will remember the feeling that they were on the brink of discovering somewhere entirely other. In Polly and Digory’s case, they find Uncle Andrew and his magic rings. And through some disgraceful trickery, he manages to get them both to touch the rings and so become his experimental subjects, transported at once out of this world.

Beautifully, they aren’t immediately in another world as such – they are in the wood between the worlds, a peaceful forest full of identical round shining pools. It’s the pools that lead to the other worlds. It takes them a little while to work this out, and work out the magic of the rings.

And they travel this way to Narnia?

Well – in the end yes, and I don’t want to give away too much there – but first they find themselves in Charn, a dying world. They wake Queen Jadis, a formidable woman quite determined to go back to earth with them and rule it… If you’re familiar with the later books, you might be able to guess who she becomes. Along the way, they rip up a lamppost and plant a tree that is later cut down to become a wardrobe… There are so many lovely touches for readers who know The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. But it’s also a beautiful little standalone.

I’m noticing a couple of similarities between this and your next choice… Tell us about The Lives of Christopher Chant, by Diana Wynne-Jones.

Yes, there are some striking parallels. This is also a standalone prequel written after the original (which was Charmed Life), and it also features an in-between space that leads to the other worlds…

There is some great research on the recurring features of childhood play, and one common motif is liminal spaces – spaces that don’t quite belong to one place or another, and haven’t got an allocated use – alleys and gaps and abandoned spaces. The unused attic space of old townhouses, in the case of The Magician’s Nephew. I think these between-world spaces really tap into that.

But there’s an additional brilliant touch in The Lives of Christopher Chant, which is that this in-between space is accessed by dreaming. Christopher doesn’t realise that other people’s dreams aren’t like his. He simply gets up each night and finds the corner he needs to turn to enter ‘the place between the worlds’, a rather formless and unfriendly valley.

So he finds the worlds himself? No trickery from uncles?

That’s right, and I think it’s a big part of the appeal. All the adults in Christopher’s life have designs for him, and argue with each other over his future, and shunt him around to all these places he doesn’t want to be. But at night, he’s off exploring a series of worlds, and it’s not dangerous or scary or confusing – he’s very confident pottering around in them, enjoying some independence there. He hangs out with mermaids and breaks into temples and tries weird foods and just generally explores.  It’s not a huge deal.  Sometimes he’s too tired and he can’t be bothered.

This is the beauty of Diana Wynne-Jones, I think. Her magic feels so real, because it’s never overblown. It’s just another fact in people’s lives. It turns out that Christopher can only dream this way because he’s a nine-lived enchanter, and that means he’s going to have to train to be the next Chrestomanci, a hugely important magical job – and he reacts as you would if you wanted to stay at your boarding school and play cricket, and instead you are sent to live with stuffy government bureaucrats. It feels incredibly real, and so easy to get immersed in.

So far, we’ve talked about novels written with children in mind, but your next choice is aimed at adults: could you introduce Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi?

I love this book. I really, really love this book. As portal fantasy it’s a little unusual – we spend most of the book in the secondary world, and understanding the relationship to our world is an important thread in the book. Which I won’t spoil. But this book isn’t just unusual portal fantasy, it’s unusual full stop. I’ve never read anything like it. When I read fantasy, I really want it to surprise me, to do something I’ve never seen before – and Piranesi delivers in spades.

Piranesi is our main character, who is writing in his journal, the text we are ostensibly reading. He lives almost entirely alone in a vast house full of statues, which is periodically flooded by tides. Everything about his survival here he undertakes alone, and it’s hard won, but he seems content. He doesn’t seem too sure about his past, or the nature of the House – he’s just here. And he doesn’t know anything about the Other, the only other person ever seen in the House. He thinks of him warmly, he’s always hopeful of seeing him. It really gets straight to your heart, this poor man – he’s named all the statues, as well as the bones of some mysterious previous inhabitants, just to populate his world.

It sounds dystopian.

Ah, but it doesn’t feel that way, or not entirely. As Piranesi writes: “The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.” There’s a real calm, a sort of terrible beauty – it’s a world full of water and lilies and clouds and impassive white statues, and Piranesi himself is so free of any pretension or angst. I think Clarke is evoking a state of mind, a kind of solitude, that can be appealing in its own way. And that provokes questions… but I’ll leave that train of thought there, not to spoil anything.

It’s a really short novel. I recommend trying to read it all in a short space of time. It’s such a meditative piece, with such beautiful echoes in the imagery, that you don’t want it too broken up.

Let’s talk about your fourth choice. It’s the second in a trilogy – Philip Pullman’s The Subtle Knife, from the His Dark Materials trilogy.

Full disclosure – when I read this book as a teenager, I found it very stressful, and it was hard for me to enjoy it. Right in the opening, the main character believes they have killed someone. I was an angsty guilt-inclined child, and that was in my mind the absolute worst thing that could happen to anyone, to have become a killer; and it was much too real to me. Now, I would say it’s to the book’s credit that I believed in such a bold opening so absolutely. And re-reading it as an adult, I could relax enough to appreciate the tour de force that follows.

I chose the second book in the trilogy because this is where Pullman really begins to take advantage of his multiverse setting. There is a scientific aesthetic to the existence and discovery of multiple worlds in this series – researchers are investigating the phenomenon, and we meet scientists and philosophers and would-be exploiters. All those folks can only learn about the worlds laboriously and slowly. But Will, one of the two leads, has a pure fantasy-object, and it’s perfect – an iconically desirable magical item. His ‘subtle knife’ can slice through the air into another world, creating a temporary portal. When he uses it, you can almost feel it slipping through the secret stuff that keeps us separated from those just-out-there realities…

The first book, Northern Lights, begins in a secondary world – but Will is from our world, right?

Yes, and that’s where this book begins. It gives a fantastic realism punch. There’s a thrill, coming straight into this one from the first book: we’ve just left Lyra and daemons and talking armoured bears, and suddenly we’re in residential suburbia in Oxford, with a son worrying about his mother and her mental health problems and the very earthly authorities who might interfere. And you think, how is this going to relate? Am I really going to find out that this ordinary, fairly bleak reality, a piece of my reality, belongs in the same universe as Lyra?

And that’s the beauty of portal fantasy – linking our world to the magic. I think it speaks to the way that sometimes there’s suddenly a new idea, or a new person, or a new decision, or a moment of transcendence – and, briefly or permanently, our ordinary world opens out.

And your last choice flips that idea on its head, doesn’t it?

Yes! Ah, it’s such a sad premise.

Could you introduce us? This is Seanan McGuire’s Every Heart a Doorway.

In this book, there’s a special home for teenagers who have been through a portal, and come back, and can’t find their way out again. They love their worlds. Nancy has been in the land of the dead, and she desperately misses the slow, quiet transcendence of that world. Her heart is broken.

Of course, no one believes her – until she is taken to Miss West, who runs the home and the others under her care, who have all gone through their own doorways. Nancy’s parents believe it’s a rehab-type institution, but really it’s a sanctuary. They are each other’s best comfort. All of them are deeply strange as citizens of this world, but perfectly suited to the world they left – pleasingly representing, between them, the standard gamut of fantasy and sci-fi vibes you might expect to find on a well-stocked bookshelf.

The book itself is then structured around a murder mystery. It’s neatly executed. But it’s that core concept that has stuck with me.

It’s another short read, right?

Yes, it’s a novella. It won the Nebula, the Hugo and the Locus for best novella. It reads perfectly as a standalone, but it’s the first in a series, so there’s plenty more there for people who would like to linger a little longer.

Which, I suppose, is exactly the opposite of the wayward children’s predicament.

We’ve all known what it is to leave a fantasy world behind…

Exactly! What a perfect idea.