Book Review, Fiction

Book Review: “The Refrigerator Monologues” by Catherynne M. Valente

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The Refrigerator Monologues by Catherynne M. Valente

Yet another interesting work from CMV, who is becoming a rather versatile and imaginative  storyteller.

The collection of stories comes from a conceptual mash up of Gail Simone’s Women in Refrigerators, and Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues.  Get it?  I had to read the Acknowledgments to know what this is all about.

The stories are set in a sort of comic book Hell, which is wonderfully imagined and told. Being dead is bad, but it’s not the end of the world. Unfortunately, it’s actually forever, which is the opposite of the end of the world.

Valente kind of flips the old saying that ‘hell is other people’. The best part of this afterlife is that everybody is there. You can’t enjoy life (‘cause you’re dead, dummy), but you can still meet at talk and go to the clubs. Unfortunately, you have to wear whatever they buried you in, which is less than optimal, fashionwise.

The Hell Hath Club meets regularly to tell and hear these biographical monologues (a la TVM). The stories tell about the travails of women who have been written out of the plots of their boyfriend’s superhero story. I.e., they are Simone’s Refrigerator Women, depowered, tortured, and ultimately killed off as plot devices in superhero stories.  Male superhero stories.

It is clear that Valente cares about comics (more than I do), and also about feminism (more personally than I do), which adds a bit of spice both to her writing and to reading her stories. But honestly, I liked them fine as they are, before I looked stuff up. You don’t need to be a feminist superhero fan to like the book, though it might push you to be interested in both, just because its fun to read.

Valente is an excellent writer, and loves superhero comics. The stories are imaginative and funny and wonderful and larger than life. As she says, “creating an entire superhero universe to make a point was ridiculous.”

Waiter! More ridiculousness, please! A round of ridiculousness for the house!

  1. Catherynne M. Valente, The Refrigerator Monologues, New York, Saga Press, 2017.

 

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