A brilliant, savage look at the way comics treat women
5 stars
If you know a bit about comics, The Refrigerator Monologues is a fascinating book; if you know a lot about comics, it's absolutely searing.
The framing story here is The Hell Hath Club -- a gathering of ladies who lunch in Deadtown. They're all dead; they were all associated with superheroes (and/or villains); and their stories are sad, and smart, and honest.
All names have been changed to protect the poor innocent IP, but if you know comics at all well, it's pretty obvious who all of them are. The framing story is narrated by our Gwen Stacy variant; other members of the club range from Mera to Jean Grey to Harley (yes, she's not dead in-canon, but it's an interesting counterpoint) to, of course, poor forgotten Alex DeWitt, whose fate spawned the meme of "fridging" in the first place.
Each of them gets to tell their own story, and …
If you know a bit about comics, The Refrigerator Monologues is a fascinating book; if you know a lot about comics, it's absolutely searing.
The framing story here is The Hell Hath Club -- a gathering of ladies who lunch in Deadtown. They're all dead; they were all associated with superheroes (and/or villains); and their stories are sad, and smart, and honest.
All names have been changed to protect the poor innocent IP, but if you know comics at all well, it's pretty obvious who all of them are. The framing story is narrated by our Gwen Stacy variant; other members of the club range from Mera to Jean Grey to Harley (yes, she's not dead in-canon, but it's an interesting counterpoint) to, of course, poor forgotten Alex DeWitt, whose fate spawned the meme of "fridging" in the first place.
Each of them gets to tell their own story, and unsurprisingly Valente does then more justice in pretty much every case than they ever got in the comics: telling the story from their point of view.
The thing about the "fridge" meme (and here I'm using "meme" in the traditional sense of "infectious idea", sometimes a bad one) is that it's all about killing female characters (typically love interests) as a means to allow the Men to go and Emote. It's crude and pretty mysogynistic at its core, and while it's less common than it used to be, there's been an awful lot of it in comics.
So this instead centers the stories of the women, each of them getting their own monologue (typically a full chapter) to tell the story as they saw it. Those stories aren't quite identical to the ones in the comics, but if you know the originals, these rhyme quite closely. Each is very personal, very effective, and each drives home the sheer awfulness of the victim trope.
In this case, I'll specifically recommend reading this one via audiobook if that is convenient for you. The narrator, Karis Campbell, handles the job with remarkable nuance. Each of these women has a very different background and personality, and she nails the different voices astonishingly well, to the point where, if I don't know it was all the same reader, I wouldn't necessarily have guessed it. From the punk attitude of our Mera cognate to the coquettish Harley to the utterly despairing Jean, she brings each one powerfully to life.
This really is a book for those who at least somewhat know the comics; I'm not sure it would land as powerfully if you don't have that background. But I give it my highest recommendation, especially if you do know some of the stories it is inspired by.
