The Militia House

April 13, 2023

DEBUT The narrator of this debut novel is a 22-year-old corporal responsible for a small group of U.S. soldiers on FOB Z, a base in Helmand Province, Afghanistan. He's unprepared for his responsibilities, but he realizes everyone else is unprepared too. Days on the base tick by with a mixture of boredom, low-grade anxiety, and reflections on cultural differences between the American and British troops with whom they share the base. When the Brits tell the Americans about an allegedly haunted building just past the boundaries of the base, the lure proves too tempting for the Americans to resist. What follows is a slow descent into a psychological hell that only war could conjure, one that will follow Corporal Loyette long after he has left the battlefields of Afghanistan. The terror in this novel is gothic and ominous but will nevertheless keep readers enthralled. VERDICT Milas served in Helmand Province and writes with clarity and precision about the physical and psychological realities of the war in Afghanistan. Fans of Stephen King's horror and Phil Klay's fictional explorations of war will be drawn to this.--Colin Chappell

Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 15, 2023
Q: What happens when the fog of war gets inside one's head? A: The military novel gone gothic. 2010. Loyette, a corporal newly assigned to a forward base in Afghanistan, has been tasked with leading a small group in offloading cargo from helicopters. After his brother was killed in action, Loyette--in what he now sees as a gung-ho blunder--left college to join up, and he's mostly marking time until he can go home. The work is lonely, intermittent, often dreary; he and his squad are safe within the walls of the compound but bored and anxious and hypervigilant. Just outside the camp's gates sits the empty husk of a Soviet-era barracks in which, they're told, a massacre of the occupiers occurred, and--an idle mind being the gothic novelist's workshop--they decide to make a brief tour; perhaps they can snag a souvenir. While there, Loyette and his men grow disoriented, lose track of time, and a staircase to a basement seems to disappear. Once they emerge, they ignore or explain away the oddity and get back to their stultifying routine, but strange things start happening--inexplicably altered drawings, a notebook disappearing and reappearing (Loyette has been in trouble for acts of too-candid journalism, which is part of how he's ended up here), porcupine quills showing up in odd places, sleepwalking--and then, it seems, the shadows and strangenesses extend beyond them, start to affect everyone on the base. When one of Loyette's men goes missing, there's only one place he could possibly be. Loyette and another member of the squad feel they have no choice but to attempt a rescue mission...straight down the rabbit hole that is the militia house. At this point, Milas nimbly and delicately balances the book between genres: It would be a relief for Loyette, and for the reader, if we could classify it--label it, defang it--as horror rather than having, agonizingly, to view it as a realistic portrait of a war-damaged mind collapsing in on itself. The novel turns, as the gothic often does, on what happens when one can no longer distinguish inside from out, mind from world, fear from menace. A mostly sharp, disturbing debut.

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Starred review from May 29, 2023
Horror debuts don’t come much more impressive than this unsettling offering from Milas, who puts his experience as a U.S. Marine stationed in Afghanistan to good use. While setting a haunted house in the Afghan desert isn’t intuitive, Milas’s facility for capturing the mixed terror and boredom of war makes this a standout. It’s 2010, and Cpl. Alex Loyette is in Helmand Province overseeing soldiers at a forward operating base that provides logistical support for transport helicopters. Near the base is an abandoned Soviet-era building known as the militia house, which, according to British soldiers who’ve been at the base the longest, was the site of a brutal massacre of Russian soldiers, who’d purportedly been skinned alive by mujahideen in the ’80s. Loyette and his men can’t resist the temptation to sneak a visit to the house, a brief foray that leads to some terrifying consequences, leaving all parties haunted. Milas is brilliant at making his lead’s eerie experiences and surreal hallucinations vivid, scary, and psychologically nuanced. Fans of classic horror will welcome this outstanding new talent.