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Karen Michalson has written four novels, including The Maenad’s God, which was selected by Independent Book Review as one of the best novels of 2022 and by IndieReader as one of the Best Reviewed Books of March 2023. It also received a 5-Star Highly Recommended Award of Excellence from The Historical Fiction Company.
Her earlier novels form the Enemy Glory Trilogy: Enemy Glory, Hecate’s Glory, and The King’s Glory. Enemy Glory, the first book of the trilogy, was one of the books that received the most votes for the Locus Award for Best First Novel. It was chosen for Locus’s Recommended Reading List of Best First Novels.
Michalson’s first book, a non-fiction work, Victorian Fantasy Literature’s Literary Battles with Church and Empire, examines the non-literary and non-aesthetic reasons underlying the bias in favor of realism in the formation of the traditional literary canon of nineteenth-century British fiction.
Her books have been favorably reviewed by Clarion Foreword, Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, Independent Book Review, Literary Titan, Blue Ink Review, and numerous others.
Michalson practiced criminal law for a decade. She left the law profession to return to her novel-writing career full time. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Massachusetts and a JD from Western New England University School of Law.
Reviewed by Asher Syed for Readers' Favorite
The Maenad's God by Karen Michalson is an occult mystery novel that revolves around a disillusioned FBI agent named Pete Morrow set in the 1990s. Pete is caustic in his view of the world and, despite his best attempts to do as little as possible, things have a tendency to lead him where he needs to be. Getting a job at the FBI was unexpected, he is volatile toward others and has a general disdain for everyone. When Pete is transferred from one investigative unit to a military base to investigate a drug-dealing operation, the job he applied for as a joke gets very, very real. Between Mafioso, a soldier gone missing, a band that seems to have its drumsticks in everything, a second murder, a false identity, and a horrible find in the desert that makes whatever Jimmy Hoffa went through look amateurish, Pete must navigate a path littered with all things metaphysical and corrupt against the tide of public and media perception.
If there is one slice of discourse by a character that Pete would actually agree with in The Maenad's God by Karen Michalson, it's when a dubious preacher utters, “We are dirt. We are nothing. We are putrid flesh, Lord. We are worms and less than worms.” Pete's snark-o-meter is off the charts and this is what makes him brilliant as a character. Michalson as a writer has a style reminiscent of Nell Zink's Nicotine, and Pete's blurry escapism into literature is on a par with that of Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey. I loved the mystical elements of Pete's journey and I especially liked when he begins to emulate what it is he might be up against in his own way. The story has intrigue and even though Pete's soliloquies sometimes wander off into the weeds, Michalson keeps the suspense moving with characters who are so lifelike that they feel real and landscape descriptions that border on cinematic. And who doesn't love it when a band is in the mix? This is a fantastic story with a lot to offer and I can see its potential for incredible spin-offs.
