The Militia House by John Milas horror book reviewsThe Militia House by John Milas horror book reviewsThe Militia House by John Milas

2023’s The Militia House is the debut novel of John Milas. Set in Afghanistan in 2010, it follows a team assigned to a Landing Zone as they are drawn into an abandoned Russian-invasion-era “militia” house close to their base. The sense of dread grows as the story continues, veering into a surreal world, but as in real life, the greatest horror may simply be war.

Our first-person narrator is Corporal Loyette, and his team consists of Johnson, Blount and Vargas. Their primary work is to unload the helicopters that come in with supplies and gear. At first, they share their base with a U.K. group, but the Brits are getting ready to ship out. Loyette, from the opening pages, is a conflicted narrator. He is bored. He doesn’t like the military, even though he joined up. He frequently thinks of his dead younger brother, who also enlisted. Loyette is reluctant to acknowledge anything good about himself, but it’s clear he’s good at his job and he cares about his team.

World War I soldiers are credited with the observation that “war is long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of terror.” For the first half of the book, boredom is the real enemy here. The soon-to-be-leaving Brits take Loyette and his gang on a couple of forbidden field-trips, one to swim in a nearby reservoir, and one to see the “militia house.” It was used to house Russian troops until the mujahedeen attacked it and killed the soldiers. Even before Loyette and the others enter the house, though, it’s clear something is wrong. Vargas has troubled dreams and talks in his sleep. The graffiti in their sleeping space, there long before they moved in, seems to be changing… or is Loyette just remembering it wrong? Their first excursion through the militia house is anti-climactic, but once the Brits leave, the strangeness increases.

Then Vargas goes missing, and Loyette has to confront the house.

Milas excels at prose, and his descriptions of the landscape come from his own experiences in Afghanistan. The sense of place and mood is palpable. While there isn’t much new in the haunted house, the few details that are—the porcupine quills!—are surreal and chilling.

The militia house is a cursed house in a landscape that does not welcome outsiders, and Milas delivers that part of the story expertly. The long horizon, the silences, the dust, are sinister and overwhelming. It’s Loyette’s sense of dislocation that is terrifying. He doesn’t belong in Afghanistan, but he doesn’t feel like he belongs in a conventional middle-class American home, or in college, or maybe anywhere. It isn’t just that he is dislocated in the middle of war, it’s that he’d dislocated in life. The sharp turn near the end of the story, where the militia house makes that nearly literal, was a bit too on the nose for me, and the end didn’t work as well as the rest of the book.

Still, this is a shivery ready that stayed with me. It left wondering about the psychic wounds of war. I’ll make a note to watch for more books by this writer.

Published in 2023. Stephen King meets Tim O’Brien in John Milas’s The Militia House, a spine-tingling and boldly original gothic horror novel. It’s 2010, and the recently promoted Corporal Loyette and his unit are finishing up their deployment at a new base in Kajaki, Afghanistan. Their duties here are straightforward—loading and unloading cargo into and out of helicopters—and their days are a mix of boredom and dread. The Brits they’re replacing delight in telling them the history of the old barracks just off base, a Soviet-era militia house they claim is haunted, and Loyette and his men don’t need much convincing to make a clandestine trip outside the wire to explore it. It’s a short, middle-of-the-day adventure, but the men experience a mounting agitation after their visit to the militia house. In the days that follow they try to forget about the strange, unsettling sights and sounds from the house, but things are increasingly . . . not right. Loyette becomes determined to ignore his and his marines’ growing unease, convinced that it’s just the strain of war playing tricks on them. But something about the militia house will not let them go. Meticulously plotted and viscerally immediate in its telling, The Militia House is a gripping and brilliant exploration of the unceasing horrors of war that’s no more easily shaken than the militia house itself.

Author

  • Marion Deeds

    Marion Deeds, with us since March, 2011, is the author of the fantasy novella ALUMINUM LEAVES. Her short fiction has appeared in the anthologies BEYOND THE STARS, THE WAND THAT ROCKS THE CRADLE, STRANGE CALIFORNIA, and in Podcastle, The Noyo River Review, Daily Science Fiction and Flash Fiction Online. She’s retired from 35 years in county government, and spends some of her free time volunteering at a second-hand bookstore in her home town.

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