The refrigerator monologues

Catherynne M. Valente, 1979-

Book - 2017

"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 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"--

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Subjects
Genres
Short stories
Published
London ; New York : Saga Press [2017]
Language
English
Main Author
Catherynne M. Valente, 1979- (author, -)
Other Authors
Annie Wu (illustrator)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
147 pages : illustrations ; 22 cm
ISBN
9781481459341
  • The Hell Hath Club
  • Paige Embry is dead
  • The Hell Hath Club vs. the space-time continuum
  • The heat death of Julia Ash
  • The Hell Hath Club vs. the evil clown
  • The tragical comedy or comical tragedy of Pauline Ketch
  • The Hell Hath Club vs. the might of Atlantis
  • The ballad of Blue Bayou
  • The Hell Hath Club vs. the Jungian subconscious
  • Daisy Green says I love you
  • The Hell Hath Club vs. the girl in the refrigerator
  • Happy birthday, Samantha Dane
  • The Hell Hath Club vs. eternity.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Actor Campbell delivers a spot-on reading of this inventive story collection about a made-up comic book universe. Set in a back-street area of the afterlife known as Deadtown, Valente's connected stories concentrate on the demise of six women who stood behind or beside male superheroes, only to have their lives sacrificed to benefit their male companions' plotlines-in other words, they all lived as secondary characters. Now the women hold court in the afterlife to tell their own stories as part of the Hell Hath Club. Actor Campbell fully develops and differentiates the character voices of all six women. Paige Embry, who died when her superhero lover, Kid Mercury, failed to save her as she plunged from a bridge, comes across as pragmatic, with a resigned attitude toward her role as a tragic figure in her former lover's past. In contrast is Polly, the psychotic moll to her supervillain boyfriend. Campbell voices Polly with childish giggles and an innocent naiveté that fails to mask her depraved nature. From a grieving Queen of Atlantis to a newly dead victim of a superhero's archnemesis, Campbell presents each woman's stories with skill and aplomb. It makes for one hell of an audiobook. A Saga hardcover. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

This short collection of stories dissects with painful clarity the too-common comic book trope of endangering, abusing, and killing the women in male superheroes' lives solely to raise the stakes in the hero's story (comics fans will recognize the title as a reference to the fate of Green Lantern's girlfriend, who was murdered and stuffed in a fridge). From a coffee shop in the after-life burg of Deadtown, the "Hell Hath Club" characters inspired by Gwen Stacy, Jean Grey, Harley Quinn, and other iconic women from comics tell the tales of their downfalls. The stories are gripping, exciting, and (very, very) grim, and each is not merely a riff on famous comics figures but full of original, surprising, and humanizing color. Karis A. Campbell's excellent reading is marred by an occasional mispronunciation but demonstrates her remarkable ability to conjure characters as she creates a unique voice for each of the book's six narrators. VERDICT Recommended for fans of comics such as Chelsea Cain's Mockingbird and Kelly Sue DeConnick's Captain Marvel and Bitch Planet, or readers who would enjoy a feminist take on George R.R. Martin and Melinda Snodgrass's "Wild Cards" books. ["Valente proves her adroitness with imagery and emotion in this extraordinary book of linked stories": LJ 5/15/17 starred review of the S. & S. hc.]--Jason Puckett, Georgia State Univ. Lib., Atlanta © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

In a slim book of linked short stories, Valente (The Girl Who Raced Fairyland All the Way Home, 2016, etc.) frees the voices of women from the world of comic-book superheroes.In Deadtown, Valente's vividly imagined land of the dead, a group of dead women gather at the Lethe Cafe to share their stories with each other. They call themselves the Hell Hath Club, and they have each suffered, disastrously and violently, through their relationships with superheroes. Paige Embry was a lab intern who created a mysterious substance that turned her boyfriend into the crime-fighting Kid Mercury and spawned a supervillain. Julia Ash was a superhero in her own right, with powers that grew ever stronger and eventually turned her fellow superheroes against her. Samantha Dane embodied the term that inspired the title of the book: she was an actual woman in a refrigerator, gruesomely murdered to serve as a plot device in the narrative of her boyfriend and his freshly minted powers. The world of the Hell Hath Club is packed with delightful detailsin the land of the dead, the entertainment is excellent and includes burned-down theaters, forgotten songs, and all the beloved rock stars and actresses the world has lostand enough solidity that you can imagine the comics these characters might have come from even though they do not exist. The stories are entertaining but not a romp. Valente chooses to eschew the soothing route of "saving" her heroines or even letting them save themselves. Instead, she gives them strong voices and allows them to rage, mourn, and regret. She gives them, and the reader, the chance to be furious at the common use of death and incapacitation of women as lazy plot points and reminds us that other stories are always possible. A ruthless but absorbing and provocative reshaping of the idea that the girlfriend dies, again. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

The Refrigerator Monologues THE HELL HATH CLUB I'm dead. The deadest girl in Deadtown. It's been a while now. I'm comfortable with the word. You wouldn't believe how comfortable the dead can get. We don't tiptoe. Dead. Dead. Dead. Flying Ace of the Corpse Corps. Stepping the light Deathtastic. I don't actually know what a doornail is, but we have a lot in common. Dying was the biggest thing that ever happened to me. I'm famous for it. If you know the name Paige Embry, you know that Paige Embry died. She died at night. She died stupidly. She died for no reason. She fell off a bridge like a suicide leap and nobody caught her. She dropped into the water, her spine snapped, and the last things she probably saw was those astonishing lights in the sky, the lights of Doctor Nocturne's infernal machine igniting every piece of metal in the city, turning skyscrapers into liquid purple fire while Kid Mercury punched the bad guy over and over again, maybe because he was grieving already, maybe because he loved fighting more than girls and it was his biggest fight yet, maybe because that's what the script of his life told him to do, maybe because he couldn't stop. Paige Embry died watching her boyfriend save New York City. When the fires went out in Manhattan, they went out in her eyes, too. It's nice to be famous for something, I guess. And the thing about me is, I'm not coming back. Lots of people do, you know. Deadtown has pretty shitty border control. If you know somebody on the outside, somebody who knows a guy, a priest or a wizard or a screenwriter or a guy whose superpower shtick gets really dark sometimes or a scientist with a totally neat revivification ray who just can't seem to get federal funding, you can go home again. But we go steady, Death and me. Nobody can tear us apart. Not everybody wants to go back. Life's okay in Deadtown. The early bird special lasts all day and the gas is free. There's no fiery rings of artisanal punishment down here. Just neighborhoods. Blackstones. Bodegas. Walk-up apartments with infinite floors. The subways run on time. Yeah, sure, there's skulls and femurs and gargoyles all over the place and the architects never met a shade of black they didn't like, but hey--good design is all about a unified aesthetic. You get used to it. It starts to feel like home. And the gargoyles are really nice guys. The one living on my balcony is called Brian. He has three heads and he's super into slam poetry. Deadtown is like anyplace else. It's scary at first, but you get into a rhythm. Find a favorite park. Put a couple of pictures up on your wall. Pretty soon, you can't imagine living anywhere else. Not everyone adjusts. I've seen girls run down the main drag toward the EXIT sign with smiles on their faces that would break you in half. Then again, I've seen others dragged back to the land of the living, screaming and sobbing and clawing through the dirt till their fingernails snap off and their mouths fill up with snot. But not me. No way. No how. If there's a constant in the universe, it's that Paige Embry is dead. I am a permanent error page. 404: Girl Not Found. Oh, sure, I know a guy on the outside. A pretty damn powerful guy. A guy with the speed of a maglev train, the brainpower of a supercomputer, and the strength of a half-dozen Hollywood Hercules. A guy who can slalom between skyscrapers like gravity forgot to take down his name and number. But he's never once peeked in on me. Never once caught me, in all the times I've fallen. I hear he's dating now. We do get the news here in Deadtown. Every morning in four colors. He's got somebody prettier than a lipstick ad who'll stay home while he fights crime, waving from a window in a goddamn apron. I bet she lives forever. I think about Tom Thatcher a lot. Kid Mercury. I came up with that name, you know. He wanted to call himself Mr. Mercury. But I said, Tommy, that sounds like a car dealership. You're eighteen. You're not even halfway to being a Mister yet. We're still kids, you and me. The thing I hate about being dead is you can't move on. I was in love with him when I died, so I'll be in love with him till the sun burns out. I used to say that actual thing, curled up next to Tom in bed, my leg draped over Kid Mercury's marvelous thigh, as romantic as a heart-shaped balloon. I'll love you till the sun burns out. Well, now it's factually, actually true and it is just a huge bummer. I'm frozen. I'm stuck. I'm Paige Embry forever, the Paige Embry that died with all that violet flame flickering in her blank eyes. I can never be anyone else. I can never see a therapist or eat all the ice cream ever made or go out with my friends and drunk-dial him and tell him I hate him and I never came when he fucked me, not even once, not even after he got his powers, and then call again in the morning and apologize and hide in my couch watching a million episodes of Law & Order all in a row. I don't get to start dating again. I get to wait in a black window for a guy who's never coming home. At least it's a nice window. But one thing the dead do love is telling our stories. We get to take our stories with us. They don't take up a lick of room in the suitcase. Most days I leave my apartment in Hell's Kitchen (actual Hell's actual Kitchen), go down to the Lethe Café, order a cup of nothing, look out the window at the blue-gas burntbone streetlamps, and wait for the girls. Ladies who lunch. Ladies who lost. You don't have to be lonely down here if you don't want to be. They come one by one, all big eyes and long legs, tucking strands of loose hair behind their ears, carrying pocketbooks and hats and secret griefs. Julia, Pauline, Daisy, Bayou, Samantha and more and others. Every time they open the frosted-glass door a gust of autumn leaves and moonlight blows in and sticks against the legs of the tables. They apologize to Neil, the gargoyle behind the espresso machine. He shakes his big woolly wolfshead, pulls a black ristretto shot of emptiness and says, Don't you worry about it, honey. It's always autumn in Deadtown. It's always the middle of the night, even at nine in the morning. We call ourselves the Hell Hath Club. There's a lot of us. We're mostly very beautiful and very well-read and very angry. We have seen some shit. Our numbers change--a few more this week, a few less next, depending on if anyone gets called up to the big game. You can't keep your lunch date if some topside science jockey figures out how to make a zombie-you. We're totally understanding about that sort of thing. She'll be back. They always come back. Zombies never last, power sputters out, and clones don't have the self-preservation instinct God gave a toddler in a stove shop. I watch them come and go and, sometimes, for a minute, I think that sweet-faced geek in his lab will reanimate my rotting corpse for once. But he never looks twice at me. Never picked myself for the team for all eternity. I guess you could call me the President of the Hell Hath Club. It's honorary and empty and mostly means I get to the café first and hold our table. I order for everyone. I keep the minutes, such as they are. And when the girls settle in, we open our stories up like the morning edition. News, sports, stocks, funny pages. It's all right there, neat and tidy and well-crafted and finished. Everything that ever happened to us. With a big fat D-Day headline over the part where magic became real, superheroes hit the scene, and the world went absolutely, unashamedly, giggles-and-lollipops-for-good-behavior crazy. Excerpted from The Refrigerator Monologues by Catherynne M. Valente All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.