Karen Michalson

?Then live and be damned.? Llewelyn is a brilliant young evil magician who is dying in extreme agony at the foot of his arch-enemy, the good and lawful King Walworth of Threle. Enemy Glory is Llewelyn?s astonishing deathbed confession, his alarmingly passionate and strangely lyrical account of his heartbreaking decision to embrace evil, told with wry humor and trenchant irony against an epic backdrop of magic, the gods, betrayed friendship, unrequited love, war, and the rise and fall of empires.

Enemy Glory

Boston 1992. While investigating a murder, a misanthropic FBI agent falls for a mysterious, mafia-backed rock musician Being open about their relationship could get both of them killed. Magical realism, LGBTQ+, literary fiction.

The Maenad's God

Karen Michalson burst on the scene recently with a new fantasy saga in the tradition of George R. R. Martin's A Game of Thrones. Beginning with Enemy Glory, now continues with Hecate's Glory. "A grand-scale fantasy taking place in an exotic realm where religion and magic vie for prominence," said Library Journal. Llewelyn is now a clerical wizard, one whose power derives not from mere arcane knowledge, but directly from Hecate, the goddess to whom he is pledged as consort. After disillusionment in love and betrayal in politics, he is an angry young student in a monastery, bonded to a dark goddess, a magician ready to fight the world. In Llewelyn's world, the realm of the supernatural lies in the North, while warring kingdoms and a complex religion devoted to gods and goddesses of good and evil dominate the South. Llewelyn schemes for revenge and creates a disaster that forces him out of the monastery and back into the wide world, where he must flee north to escape the Emperor Roguehan, for whom he has been an unreliable spy. Fleeing the enemy, he knows, he will encounter new foes, not so easily recognized. As Llewelyn travels, the story opens out into broader panoramas of his fascinating world. He will meet an enchanted dragon, befriend a half-elf minstrel, win a claim to the royal throne of far-off Gondal, and face a battle fought by an elven army.

Hecate's Glory

The evil cleric Llewelyn returns to the world without knowing how much time has passed during his makeshift trial in the North Country. His goddess, Hecate, condemns him for his recent attempt to save elvish art, the source of the world's beauty, by sacrificing himself. She tortures him as a warning against violating his evil alignment and tells him he must destroy his one-time friend and ally, King Walworth, and his adopted homeland, Threle. He must also force his former wizard master, Mirand, who is deeply aligned to good, to embrace evil. This is because Walworth and Mirand greatly damaged the world by tearing the fabric of the universe when Mirand used magic to change Threle's defeat to victory during the recent war. If he fails, Llewelyn will suffer eternal torture when he dies. Success won't be easy. Everybody he's ever had contact with--including other evil clerics--have reasons to kill him, so he needs to avoid the world while risking all to justify the world. That is, to justify the world in the sense of making it right, as the gods willed it to be, before Mirand took it upon himself to magically change history. Unwillingly aligned to evil, facing eternal torture should he violate his mandate, he must set the world right by destroying everything he ever loved.

Karen Michalson

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