Karen Novak is a writing teacher and author of the psychological-paranormal novels Five Mile House and Innocence. Her love of ghost stories is rooted in memories of life in a maybe-haunted house. Karen enjoys collage and sculpting odd figures in clay. She lives in Southwestern Ohio with her husband and their silver Lab rescue, Watson.
Books
Five Mile House
A Leslie Stone Novel
First Edition 2000
Ebook Edition 2008
Bloomsbury USA
Innocence
A Leslie Stone Novel
First Edition 2003
Ebook Edition 2008
Bloomsbury USA
The Wilderness
A Leslie Stone Novel
First Edition 2005
Ebook Edition 2008
Bloomsbury USA
First Edition 2002
Ebook Edition 2008
Bloomsbury USA
Relatively Erratic Blog
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Contact
KarenNovakWrites@gmail.com
Writing News
Karen’s first foray into fantasy, a short story titled “Tillie and the Queen” placed in the top ten of the Writer’s Digest International Writing Competition of 2026. The entry pool numbered 3300.
The Keep, Karen’s new novel currently in development has reached the happy milestone of its first 100 pages. Learn more about The Keep, a Cozy Gothic ghost story.
Reading Right Now
Accumulation
by Aimee Pokwatka
Scary is subjective. What floats your ghost ship may differ from mine. By far, Accumulation is the most effective haunted house story I’ve read since Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. What is more deeply haunting than the creepy doll? How about your troubled child? Which would be worse: getting trapped in the attic or trapped in a life that looks nothing like what you would choose? Pokwatka’s storytelling is a sly accumulation of details that amass until our heroine, the wonderfully named Tennessee Cherish, must resolve the haunting or be broken by it.
Loved it.
Absence
Andrew Dana Hudson
Reminiscent of HBO’s The Leftovers, this novel is founded on a sudden and ongoing mass disappearance of human beings. We follow a smart but disillusioned “Depopulation” investigator, Harvey Ellis, and his partner-turned-lover to a small town that promises itself to be a sanctuary from Spontaneous Human Absence. A young woman has gone missing. Did she run away or was it a depop incident that would ruin the town’s reputation for safety? Part police procedural, part speculative near-future science fiction, the story keeps a steady, thoroughly told pace. Not as emotionally stunning as the HBO outing, Absence still carries a mediative punch in its implications that being here is the most profound mystery of them all.
The September House
Carissa Orlando
What exactly is a haunted house? That is the question at the center of this deceptively bright, smartly shadowed novel. The house in question switches on its haunted nature only in the month of September. The walls bleed. Ghosts roam. No one wants to go in the basement. Determined owner Margret refuses to leave even after her husband vanishes. Her reasons why are multilayered and run deep. Off-duty ghosts need something to do. How and where they dwell the rest of the year makes for surprises big and small. A fun and moving read as the riddle of The September House is unraveled into an exploration of all that “haunted” can mean.
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