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    The Refrigerator Monologues
    The Refrigerator Monologues
    The Refrigerator Monologues
    Audiobook4 hours

    The Refrigerator Monologues

    Written by Catherynne M. Valente

    Narrated by Karis A. Campbell

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    The lives of six female superheroes and the girlfriends of superheroes. A ferocious riff on women in superhero comics.

    From the New York Times bestselling author Catherynne Valente comes a series of linked stories from the points of view of the wives and girlfriends of superheroes, female heroes, and anyone who's ever been "refrigerated": comic book women who are killed, raped, brainwashed, driven mad, disabled, or had their powers taken so that a male superhero's storyline will progress.

    In an entirely new and original superhero universe, Valente subversively explores these ideas and themes in the superhero genre, treating them with the same love, gravity, and humor as her fairy tales. After all, superheroes are our new fairy tales and these six women have their own stories to share.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHighbridge Company
    Release dateSep 26, 2017
    ISBN9781681689074
    Author

    Catherynne M. Valente

    Catherynne M. Valente is the New York Times bestselling author of over two dozen works of fiction and poetry, including Palimpsest, the Orphan’s Tales series, Deathless, Radiance, and the crowdfunded phenomenon The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making (and the four books that followed it). She is the winner of the Andre Norton, Tiptree, Sturgeon, Eugie Foster Memorial, Mythopoeic, Rhysling, Lambda, Locus, and Hugo awards, as well as the Prix Imaginales. Valente has also been a finalist for the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards. She lives on an island off the coast of Maine with a small but growing menagerie of beasts, some of which are human. Find out more on her website and on Twitter!

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    Reviews for The Refrigerator Monologues

    4/5

    130 ratings9 reviews

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    • 5/5
      The voice actor was awesome-I wish I could find more books she’s recorded. The prose of the book and the voice acting she did came together PERFECTLY. As for the book, the premise, writing styles, and journeys of each of the women were unique yet relatable. Until I listened to this book, I had never heard of the term “fridging”. To turn that concept into a series of short stories is flipping brilliant. Even if your comic book knowledge is limited to movies and Saturday morning cartoons, you will recognize reimagined characters as you get lost in the backstories of these women whom we frequently dismiss in the shadows of their super hero (or villainous) partners. Listen now!
    • 5/5
      Wow, this woman can write!
    • 3/5
      A fairly scathing look at the "Women in Refrigerators" concept of misogyny in comic books disappoints slightly by pulling its punches instead of really ripping into the subject. A series of interconnected short stories reimagine the deaths and degradations of Gwen Stacy, Jean Grey, Harleen Quinzel, Mera, Karen Page, and Alexandra DeWitt (the girlfriend of Kyle Rayner who turned up dead in a refrigerator in Green Lantern #54 in 1994).I only wish the book weren't so passive. The women are reduced to retelling their stories from a boring and detached afterlife with a sort of "what are you gonna do?" tone that captures the tragedy and injustice but does nothing to rage against or overturn the narrative. Indeed, in the acknowledgements the author undercuts the message by thanking the comic book creators who created these shared superhero universes and writes, "I have nothing but but respect and honor for the monumental feat of deliberate mythology they have, and continue to, accomplish. Where I have thrown my BANG!s and POW!s, I have done it with love, and where I have dissected, I have, I hope, made as little mess in the lab as one could hope."I'm sorry, but I would rather have walked in the door of the lab and seen every damn beaker, flask, and piece of equipment lying shattered on the floor.
    • 3/5
      The library only had the audio version of this but after listening to it I really want to read it as well. The narration on it was great. This is a set of stories about women and the various connections they have to superheroes. None of these stories end on a happy note since the title tips the reader off to that as a play on the problem comics have with “fridging “female partners of male superheroes to advance the hero’s storyline. Every story is told first person style after their death and how it happened. I enjoyed it and the stories were riffs on things that have happened in comics.
    • 2/5
      This collection of short tales from the point of view of the girlfriends and wives of superheroes is unique for sure, but somewhat off-putting to me. Some of the vignettes were entertaining, others were just plain strange. These females were all dead or the next thing to it, and these are their stories. It does not pay to be close to a superhero - it is downright dangerous. Perhaps I would have found this collection more palatable if the author could have expressed herself without the overabundance of swear words and f-bombs.
    • 5/5
      "Fridging" a character specifically refers to an incident in the Green Lantern comic book in which the hero Kyle Rayner's girlfriend Alexandra DeWitt was killed by the villain Major Force and stuffed into a refrigerator for Rayner to find later. This kind of plot device then sends the hero into a righteous wrath whereupon he then goes upon a rage-driven quest for revenge to avenge his lost love. The use of the term in a more general sense, to mean a character (who is almost always a woman) who is killed off in order to provide motivation and character development for the hero (who is almost always a man), was originally coined by Gail Simone, and has since become a widely used term to refer to this sort of lazy and misogynistic trope.The framing of "fridging" is to subordinate the fridged character to the protagonist's story - the now-dead character only exists in the story to help tell the story of the "more important" central character. Because this trope is almost always presented as a female character being sacrificed to give depth and meaning to the story of a male character, this has the effect of erasing the women's stories. In many of these cases, the female character to be killed off is presented in as shallow a way as possible - since she exists only to further someone else's story, to the extent her story is told, it is usually only told to the extent that her story intersects with the protagonist's. The end result is that there is a rogue's gallery consisting of dozens (or, more likely hundreds) of female characters whose stories were never told, because they were killed off so that Bob Squarejaw could experience a little angst and dedicate himself to vengeance. Marvel's character the Punisher is a character entirely built upon this premise, and his wife and children pretty much only exist within flashbacks in his story. I suspect that the fact that the villain's killed Wick's dog in John Wick was intended as a kind of joke - replacing the usual girlfriend, wife, sister, or daughter of the hero with a dog, and part of the commentary provided was that the dog got as much character development as the usual victim would have.Cat Valente's Refrigerator Monologues takes this trope and flips it on its head. The characters given voices in this book are all women who are residents of Deadtown - the place where the discarded comic book characters go when they die. Some characters die and then come back to life, but others, the ones who were "fridged", are all eternally confined to the never-ending autumn of Deadtown. They call themselves the Hell Hath Club, aren't happy about their deaths, and they are going to tell anyone who shows up at the Lethe Café on open mic night. They are Paige Embry, Julia Ash, Pauline Ketch, Blue Bayou, Daisy Green, and Samantha Dane, they all have their own stories to tell, and in this book Cat Valente tells them all.To provide a setting for her heroines to exist in, Valente has crafted a complete world around them, populated with super-heroes, super-villains, love interests, mentors, children, and everyone else. Although the world is very clearly inspired by the fictional worlds of some of the major comic book publishers, and several of the characters and storylines are reminiscent of characters and storylines that have appeared in those worlds, Valente's world is a distinct entity unto its own. To a certain extent, such similarities are unavoidable, and some are possibly even unintentional, but it is clear that many of the elements that run parallel to well-known comic book stories were included quite deliberately. These parallels are, after all, part of the point of the book: To highlight how these stories in previously published stories sideline and marginalize women's stories, one has to emulate them to some extent, and Valente manages to come close enough for the references to be recognizable, but not so close that the stories she is telling are diminished.[More forthcoming]
    • 5/5
      My only complaint about this book is that I WANT MORE MONOLOGUES. I had high hopes for this volume, and it absolutely did not disappoint. A collection of stories from the Hell Hath Club, women in Deadtown who died to further some superhero arc. The women are heroes, villains, and mad scientists, but all would be a part of what Gail Simone named "Women in Refrigerators" -- the trope of female characters dying as a plot device.

      I loved each of these women fiercely, and if this book doesn't make you want to wail on those who put them in Deadtown with some righteous violence, well, I'm not sure we should be friends.

      But thank you, Valente, for giving these ladies an afterlife. Where they can tell their own stories, find sisterhood, and discover new joys.
    • 4/5
      Catherynne Valente tackles gendered superhero tropes with this collection of six stories. The girls of the Hell Hath Club are dead, but they’ve found each other for company is the strange expanse of Deadtown. They gather together, drink Styx water, and commiserate about their lives and deaths. Superheroines, girlfriends of superheroes, supervillainesses… they all got the short end of the stick.I’m not super knowledgeable about comic books. I’ve seen some movies, read a few issues of Ms. Marvel, but that’s pretty much it. However, I could still tell which comic book characters most of the dead girls were supposed to be. The first one, a scientist who accidentally gives her boyfriend superpowers, is clearly based off of some girlfriend of Spiderman. The extremely powerful, only woman on her team heroine with psychic powers sounded a lot like a certain X-Man. An off kilter villainess with an impressive but misplaced loyalty to her man could be no one but Harley Quinn. Another’s the wife of Aquaman, not quite dead but slipped out of her asylum to search Deadtown for her murdered son. Of the six women, there were only two I couldn’t connect to any Marvel or DC characters. One is the famous girl in the fridge, who I’ve heard of before but don’t know much about. According to other reviewers, the last is a riff off of Karen Page, who I only know from the Netflix series.Each woman gets the chance to tell her story, and short chapters in between bridge the gap from one to the other. It’s not a long book — at only 160 pages, it’s more novella than novel. I think the length was just about right for it. I don’t think there was anything that could be cut, and I don’t see what an expansion would add.At the same time, I was never quite impressed by The Refrigerator Monologues. I think it’s tackling an important subject, but it’s more giving voice to the women stuck in bad tropes than subverting them altogether. There’s not an overarching plot. The women don’t get vengeance or fulfillment, they just get a voice and the chance to share their stories with one another. That’s a valuable thing, but I didn’t find it entirely satisfactory. In the end, I felt like the only really new thing The Refrigerator Monologues was bringing to the table was the quirky, off beat setting of Deadtown itself. Maybe I would have enjoyed The Refrigerator Monologues more if I knew more about comic books. Or maybe my expectations were simply too high.Originally posted on The Illustrated Page.I received an ARC in exchange for a free and honest review.
    • 5/5
      Deadtown isn't so bad. Forgotten songs, books, and art are all available for its inhabitants. The Hell Hath Club meets all the time, comprised of the abused, condemned, and brushed aside women of comic book fame. They each share their stories and bare their souls for each other, always welcoming new members to their ranks. Catherynne Valente skillfully created a whole new comic book world that has familiar characters by different names. The Marvel and DC universes are blended seamlessly into one with Justice League, X-Men, and the like with different names and slightly different abilites. Valente gives some easter egg type clues as to what existing characters are being referenced. It works surprisingly well and makes all the characters make sense and some appear in others' stories.The first one is Gwen Stacy, known here as Paige Embry. Despite all of her own accomplishments such as being an excellent scholar and scientist, she's known as the girl who died in order to give her boyfriend hero pain. His current girlfriend is satsisfied sitting at home, cooking his meals, and generally being subservient, but Paige wasn't. The creation of Kid Mercury (Spiderman) and his archenemesis were her fault because she improved the mercurial substance by a small margin. She tried to do the right thing and get rid of it so it wouldn't be abused, but she died. She fought with no superpowers with a bravery and a passion exceeding Kid Mercury's, but she's only known for one thing. Now her ex-boyfriend gets to get his hollow revenge and Paige leads the Hell Hath Club in Deadtown.The second is Jean Grey or Julia Ash. The Dark Phoenix saga is one of the most popular X-Men story lines and it's been done to death. Here, Julia blinks in and out of Deadtown because of how often her character is resurrected only to die again. The story reason is a character named Retcon who constantly changes her reality, but the real reason is her popularity in comics. She was the only founding woman on the X-Men team and fought alongside her fellow mutants (or mockingbirds). As Julia gained power rivalling others on the team, her male counterparts started looking at her with fear, judgment, and suspicion. Even though others were similar in power level, they didn't like her showing them up, not needing their help, or showing how much power she really has. Now, she can't even make eggs because of Retcon's power that keeps her bouncing in between realities wher she's the Dark Phoenix, an abused housewife, and others that amount to a footnote in someone else's story. Every day, at a specific time, she blissfully holds still.The third is Harley Quinn or Pauline Ketch AKA the Polly to Mr. Punch. I love the Joker's new name because it says so much about how he treats her. He calls her Polly, the one Mr. Punch loves in the play but he treats her like Judy. This was my favorite chapter because her voice and point of view is so different from the others. Her story is linear, but felt chaotic. She jumps into her own fractured musings about her past, Mr. Punch, and his nemesis Grimdark in between the main plot.Throughout their relationship, Polly is convinced that she deftly manipulates Mr. Punch by posing as a psychologist in jail and withholding Grimdark's real identity in order to lengthen their time together. The whole time, he played her by faking being zombified by drugs and later convincing her that he had feelings for her. Through it all, she's convinced her love will come to find her in Deadtown despite all the abuse he doled out.The fourth is Bayou or Mera, Queen of Atlantis who is quick to say the sea isn't the pristine blue water we picture. Despite her royal obligations, she opted to live independently, play in a punk band, and focus on partying. Children were far from her mind. During a journey to the surface (to get drunk on air), she's "saved" from drowning by John Heron (Aquaman). Her nonchalance at his accomplishments immediately annoys him (because she can do all of the same things) and she reveals that he is half Altantean. Whirlwind romance happens and Bayou unexpectedly becomes pregnant. When her son dies in a fight to save Atlantis, she's understandably devastated. John gets to callously tout his dead son as motivation to fight enemies while Bayou is branded as unstable and insufferable for expressing her loss in any way. I found Bayou's story the most heartbreaking.The fifth is Daisy Green or Daredevil's Karen Page, another woman tormented by her relationship with a superhero. At first, she was a successful actress with a lot of potential. Then, the Insomniac came into her life and she lives in constant fear of his archnemesis. When she distances herself from the Insomniac, her life returns to normal, but she can't find work. She turns to prostitution to support herself, framing it as acting for an audience of one, leading to a job as a porn star. I loved the comparison of the trajectory of a porn star and superhero career where people love you in beginning and all is wonderful, but as time goes on, people want more, get resentful, and force the hero/porn star to become darker and grittier to keep their attention until they spiral out of control. The sixth and last is the literal woman in a refrigerator, Samantha Dane or Alexandra DeWitt. Her relationship with this world's version of the Green Lantern puts her in danger. At first, they were both artists in their own right; she was a photographer while he was a graffiti artist. After he finds a pin that imbues him with powers, his values suddenly change. He treats her as inferior even though she solely brings in the money they need to survive. Samantha has to give up her dreams to make her boyfriend's a reality while he goes back on all of the ideologies they agreed on. Through all of this, his nemesis targets her and stuffs her in a refrigerator, effectively reducing her to just another reason why that hero fights and further hates his nemesis and nothing more. The newest member of the Hell Hath Club arrives in Deadtown and she is welcomed with open arms to the people who understand her most.The Refrigerator Monologues is an amazing story that frames these comic book characters in more realistic situations and shows how life is from their perspective. All of them are treated terribly and only have value in how they relate to the men in their lives when so many of them have numerous merits on their own. Catherynne Valente creates this shared universe with subtle clues as to their real identity, thematic threads, overlapping characters, and fleshed out characters all around. This is a must read for feminist fans of comic books who are frustrated at women characters being killed, raped, pushed aside, suppressed, and otherwise dismissed in favor of the "superhuman" man in their lives.