Karen Novak’s first novel, Five Mile House (2000), has been lauded as an "astonishingly well-balanced, elegant and spooky" ghost story. Its compelling tale uncovers "a complex tangle of repressed sexual power and threatening desire" as it moves inexorably toward a "simultaneous revelation of treachery and murder" (Editorial Reviews, Amazon.com). Her craftsmanship is frequently described as "polished," "deft," and "skillful." A participant in the first Colgate Writers’ Conference in 1995, she has been invaluable to its workings ever since. Her second novel, Ordinary Monsters, was published in 2002, followed by her third, Innocence, in 2003. Her most recent novel is The Wilderness: A Leslie Stone Novel (2004). As appreciative readers and critics have noted, hers are haunting, introspective novels, complex explorations on our ability as a society to see evil. Marilyn Stasio, in a New York Times review, calls her a “thinker and an imaginative storyteller" whose "scenes of horror stand their ground with the frightful intensity of a bad dream."

She is currently completing her fifth novel, The Damascus Room, in Mason, Ohio, where she resides with her husband and daughters.