The Militia House

A Novel

De: John Milas

Narrado por: Davis Brooks

Longlisted for the Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize

“An extraordinary novel about the quiet and not so quiet horrors of war.” —Roxane Gay

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.

A Macmillan Audio production from Henry Holt & Company.

Pretty good war horror

it takes a while for the actual horror to begin, but once it gets there, you're in for it. very entertaining

Mediocre

The author does a nice job setting things up then nothing happens. Like a mediocre Twilight Zone episode

No plot

I have a lot of tolerance for experimental fiction. But none for novels that seem to be moving toward closure only to refuse it. Nothing is revealed, nothing is uncovered, no one is saved or lost.

Pretty Good

It holds a nice eerie tone throughout. The language it uses can be boring at times and I struggle to see the point of the novel now that I’ve finished it…

Unreasonably Boring

I really cannot believe how boring this was. How can you make a haunted house war story so uneventful?

Horrible!

I have no idea what this was about. Can’t believe it got positive reviews. Total waste of time.