John Milas | Writers' Voices

Former Marine turned author, John Milas, joins us to discuss his chilling debut novel, The Militia House. Set in 2010 on a military base in Afghanistan, The Militia House tells the haunting tale of Corporal Alex Loyette and members of his unit as they venture into an old, abandoned militia house against the warnings of fellow Marines. What befalls them is one agonizing horror after another. When creating this story, Milas based the events on his actual experience exploring a real-life haunted militia house, its location found exactly where it’s described in the book. Similarly to the book, Milas and his men also entered this militia house together and found the walls riddled with bullet holes made from an automatic weapon. While he didn’t encounter any supernatural forces like the characters in the book, he did come out of the place feeling quite unnerved and unsettled. He recalled, “… something had happened inside of the building for sure… It certainly is a place I’ve never seen anything like or been to a place that’s like it anywhere else.”

Many of the other details in the story were also pulled from Milas’ real-life experiences as a Marine. While writing about that time in his life proved to be quite challenging, he found that incorporating the militia house within his story helped to ease some of the negativity and resentment he felt when writing about war. “I’ve struggled to not think about my experiences in the war, so all through college, I tried to write about the military… that work came through only as angry ranting. I was still too close to the experience… there’s something about being out of the military and having some distance between that and being in Afghanistan and, I guess, implementing gothic horror seemed to just give me enough distance to write about it in a way that… it really just tempered the, kind of, the ranting aspect that some of the earlier military writing I did… I guess adding this flavor, adding this genre into the mix with war writing, I think, also is a way that I convince myself that would be more compelling for readers…”

As for his future plans, Milas plans to continue writing but doesn’t anticipate pursuing it full time. With a BA and MFA in creative writing, he’d prefer to teach other aspiring writers. “I would like to teach writing because I think I derive a sense of purpose from working with people and helping people and it’s purposeful for me to write my own work, but I would like to supplement that with actually fostering the talent and efforts of younger writers and give back, honestly, the way that I came up as a young writer with all the people helping and guiding me. I think that would be really rewarding.” For now, he is content with discovering what life will be like after the release of this first novel. “Really, I want to write another book. That’s kind of what I’m thinking about. As an artist, you’re always most excited about the newest thing that you’re working on…”