The Best Portal Fiction Novels: 12 Books That Defined the Genre

Portal fiction is escapism in the purest sense. The ability to walk through a doorway and disappear into another world—it captivates the human imagination.

A portal is a threshold that, when crossed, takes you somewhere else entirely. Another world, another realm, into the past. Sometimes, it’s better. More often, it’s worse! But always different.

Cultures around the globe have long been enchanted by the concept of portals. You can find them in great literature dating back thousands of years—in mythology, in scripture, in ancient cosmology. They appear prominently in stories of life and death, from ancient Egypt to Central America to India.

The moment a human soul crosses the threshold into the realm of the dead: that’s a portal story.

Sometimes the passageways are called “doors.” Sometimes “gates.” Every mythology has its own version.

Who can say how old the idea truly is? Maybe portals have always been with us.

Their lasting power is self-evident.

Where the modern tradition begins

The thread of popular genre fiction is easier to pull apart.

If there’s a starting point for portal fiction as we know it, it belongs to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, published in 1865. Other portal stories existed before it, but none in modern fantasy fiction were as widely read—and no other book had as much influence on what followed.

What Carroll tapped into with his story of a little girl who fell down the rabbit hole and found herself in a mad world was a universal fantasy. Alice’s story has been treasured by many, passed down through generations, continuously in print since it first came out, and adapted to the screen many times.

After Carroll, publishers and writers recognized the demand. What follows is an attempt to trace that influence: twelve novels that built on his foundation across a century of portal fiction, from the first great American fantasy of 1900 to the end of the millennium. A few of them made a big impact on my childhood and even my own writing.

Read them in order and you can watch the genre grow up.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum (1900)

The 20th century opens with a tornado.

Dorothy Gale lives on the Kansas plains with her Aunt Em and Uncle Henry, a grey existence on grey farmland. When a cyclone sweeps her house into the air and deposits her in the colorful Land of Oz, she becomes the first great American portal fantasy hero.

Dorothy doesn’t step through anything—she’s taken. What waits on the other side is a world more vivid and more dangerous than the one she left.

Baum wrote thirteen Oz novels in total. The 1939 MGM film with Judy Garland seared this story into American culture.

Peter and Wendy by J.M. Barrie (1911)

Less than a decade after Oz, a boy who never grew up appeared at a nursery window in London.

Peter and Wendy—better known simply as Peter Pan—began as a play in 1904 before Barrie adapted it into a novel in 1911. The portal is as weightless as the story itself: a sprinkle of fairy dust, a happy thought, and a flight path of “second star to the right and straight on till morning.”

Neverland is populated by Lost Boys, mermaids, pirates, and a ticking crocodile. Peter, who ferries children to Neverland and back, is himself the threshold—a living door between childhood and what lies beyond.

A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs (1912)

The year after Barrie sent Wendy to Neverland, Burroughs launched a Civil War veteran toward the stars.

John Carter is prospecting in Arizona when he takes shelter in a cave from pursuing Apaches. He can’t move, can’t escape—and then finds himself standing on the red soil of Barsoom.

Mars.

The transit is unexplained—no device, no science, just a man’s consciousness crossing the void. On Barsoom, Carter encounters the four-armed green Tharks, the humanoid red Martians, and Dejah Thoris, the princess of the title, whose fate becomes his reason to stay.

The Barsoom series ran to eleven novels. Burroughs is cited as formative by C.S. Lewis, Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, and Carl Sagan—and the lineage from this book to Stargate runs straight and clear.

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis (1950)

Forty years pass between Burroughs and the wardrobe. The genre matures, and two wars tears the world apart.

For four children sent from London to escape the Blitz, a world of eternal winter waits on the other side of a wardrobe full of fur coats.

What they find in Narnia isn’t quite the safe haven they (or at least their caretakers) had hoped for. In many ways, it’s more dangerous than the world they left behind. The White Witch has forced eternal winter on the realm, and the children find themselves tangled up in her scheme. Beguiled by magical creatures and befriended by others, not the least of whom is Aslan, the talking lion at the heart of Narnia’s mythology.

Narnia changes these children for good. That’s the point. This is only the first of seven books—I read them as a young man and have treasured introducing them to my kids.

The Tunnel in the Sky by Robert A. Heinlein (1955)

Five years after Narnia, Heinlein took the genre deeper into the wilderness of science fiction.

Rod Walker is a high school student preparing for the ultimate final exam: survival. Students are gated through a portal to an alien world with nothing but basic gear and told to stay alive until it reopens. The catch? Their gate doesn’t reopen on schedule.

Days stretch into weeks, weeks into months, and the students must do something harder than survive. They have to build a society from scratch.

The Stargate franchise owes this book a considerable debt.

The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster (1961)

In the early 1960s, two American writers produced portal fantasies that have been read in classrooms ever since.

Milo is a bored boy who finds a mysterious toy tollbooth in his room. He drives through it in his toy car—half expecting nothing—and arrives in the Lands Beyond, a kingdom where words and numbers are at war and the princesses Rhyme and Reason have been banished.

Every character Milo meets is a pun or a paradox. The portal leads to wordplay, philosophy, and an opportunity to learn to love the life he has.

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle (1962)

The second great American portal fantasy of the era is darker and stranger than the first, but still designed for young adults.

Meg Murry is awkward, angry, and desperately missing her father, who disappeared while working on a classified government project. Three mysterious women—Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which—offer a way to find him: travel by tesseract, a wrinkle in the fabric of space and time.

The world they reach—Camazotz—is a dystopia of perfect conformity, every person and movement mechanically synchronized, governed by a disembodied intelligence called IT.

A Wrinkle in Time won the Newbery Medal in 1963 after being rejected by 26 publishers. Disney adapted it in 2018.

The Neverending Story by Michael Ende (1979)

The most meta portal fantasy ever written came from Germany.

Bastian Balthazar Bux is a lonely, bullied boy who steals a book from an antiquarian’s shop and reads it hidden in his school’s attic. The book is called The Neverending Story, and it describes a land called Fantastica being consumed by a force called the Nothing.

As Bastian reads, he begins to realize the book is aware of him. Characters start to reference a boy from the human world who is reading their story. The portal is the act of reading itself.

Ende published it in German in 1979; the English translation followed in 1983. Wolfgang Petersen’s 1984 film became one of the most beloved fantasy films of the decade—though Ende hated it, feeling it captured only the first half of his story and none of its soul.

The Gunslinger by Stephen King (1982)

King’s portal fantasy looks nothing like the ones that came before it.

It opens with one of the great first lines in American fiction:

“The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.”

Roland of Gilead, the last gunslinger, crosses a broken world in pursuit of the man in black. Along the way he pulls companions from other worlds through doorways into his orbit. The Dark Tower series ran to eight books and took King decades to complete—ending with one of the most contentious conclusions in popular fiction. People are still arguing about it.

It’s full of quotable lines, but the one that always stuck with me is this:

“Go then, there are other worlds than these.”

Outlander by Diana Gabaldon (1991)

By the 1990s, portal fiction had proven it could carry myth, allegory, philosophy, and horror. Gabaldon cemented its application in historical romance.

Claire Randall is a British WWII combat nurse on a second honeymoon in Scotland with her husband Frank in 1945. At the ancient standing stones of Craigh na Dun, she touches the rock—and falls through time to 1743, the eve of the Jacobite uprising.

The historical world on the other side is dangerous, politically charged, and populated by redcoats and Highland rebels. And Jamie Fraser, a Highland warrior she marries for protection.

Outlander is the first of nine novels. The Starz television series ran for seven seasons.

The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman (1995)

The final decade of the century produced two British portal fantasies that closed things out as memorably as Oz had opened them.

The first book of Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy doesn’t advertise itself as portal fiction—but everything that happens hinges on alternate Earths and the great lengths people will go to reach the doors between them. It won the Carnegie Medal in 1995 and has been adapted as both a film (2007) and an HBO series (2019).

The story centers on Lyra Belacqua—an adventurous, slightly feral girl at a boarding school in Oxford—and her dæmon Pantalaimon, the animal companion with whom she shares her soul. In Lyra’s world, every person has a dæmon: two bodies, one soul, inseparable. Any harm to one causes harm to the other.

Lyra’s Oxford looks much like ours but differs at first subtly and later in more profound ways.

Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman (1996)

The century closes in the London Underground.

Neverwhere is a story about London Below—a hidden underside of the city populated by vagabonds, weird magic, and people who have fallen through the cracks of the ordinary world. It began as a six-part BBC miniseries; the novelization became an international bestseller.

The story follows Richard Mayhew, an investment banker living an ordinary life hollowed out by boredom. When he stops to help a mysterious young woman named Door—bleeding on a London sidewalk—he finds himself cut off from everything he knows, pulled into London Below and unable to get back.

This book is a personal favorite of mine. Portals are one of Gaiman’s most reliable storytelling devices—Coraline uses them to great effect, too—but Neverwhere and its unique take on the underground tube system is really fantastic.

Other worlds than these

From a tornado in Kansas to the tunnels beneath London—those are the best portal fiction books of the 20th century. Twelve books spanning a hundred years, and the genre never ran out of new ways to answer the same question: what’s on the other side of this door?

Portal fantasy continues to thrive. New work in the genre appears every year. I've contributed a few novels myself—The Translocator Trilogy is my own attempt to write the portal fiction I most want to read.

What other portal fiction would you add to this list? Leave a comment below to share your recommendation with readers.

Your next portal fiction series

Looking for your next read? The Translocator Ebook Bundle collects the complete trilogy—The Auriga Project, The Alien Element, and The Ares Initiative—along with bonus stories set in the same world.