John Milas Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

John Milas is a published American author.

John hails from Illinois. His first fictional book to come out was released in 2023 from Henry Holt. It is titled The Militia House. The book came out to much praise and was recognized by places such as Indie Next, Indies Introduce, and The Audacious Book Club.

The Militia House was also long listed for the First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction and was nominated for a 2023 Shirley Jackson Award. John also received the opportunity to attend the Sewanee Writers’ Conference in 2024 thanks to the Walter E. Dakin fellowship.

The author has studied with many different writers that include Roxane Gay, Brian Leung, Marianne Boruch, Robert Lopez, Donald Platt, Marie Mailhot, Julie Price Pinkerton, Jill McCorkle, Sharon Solwitz, and Maurice Carlos Ruffin.

Milas also participates in his community locally by hosting workshops held at the library. He also lends his time to judging various creative writing contest. He has worked as a journalist and an editor on a freelance basis and read submissions for different literary magazines like Ninth Letter and the Sycamore Review.

John has served in the Marine Corps. In 2010 he was deployed to Afghanistan. After, he attended college and received a BA and MFA in creative writing. He loves to write, read, and watch baseball. He has also served as crew on the 2007 short Near Miss and an art production assistant on Welcome to Tolono. Milas was also an actor and a property master on Disposable, a 2015 film, and appeared as himself in Alien Fans, a 2010 documentary featuring interviews with fans of the classic science fiction movie Alien.

The Militia House is the first fictional book to come out from author John Milas. If you like authors such as Stephen King or have an appetite for gothic horror, you may like this original story that Roxane Gay describes as an ‘extraordinary novel’ that takes on the horrors of war, both ‘quiet and not so quiet’.

The year is 2010. Corporal Loyette has been promoted recently, and he’s completing his deployment along with their unit in Kajaki, Afghanistan, at the base. The things that they have to do here are pretty simple. They usually have to load and unload various cargo into helicopters and out of them. So most of their time is just filled with dullness and an occasional feeling of dread.

They’re replacing the British troops, who have been telling them all about a militia house that they think is haunted. It’s the old barracks and it’s off base, from the Soviet era. Loyette is interested, and so are his men. They decide that they’re going to take a trip of their own to go see what’s going on with the house and whether it really is haunted.

The excursion is intended to be brief and to go down in the middle of the day. They go there, they come back, and everything seems fine at first. But one by one, all of them are starting to experience a sense of agitation that is only growing larger.

Days go by after, and they’re all doing their best to try and put all of the sounds and sights from the militia house out of their mind. However, they find that things are just off in some way. Loyette wants to put the unease that they all feel to the side, and decides that the best thing to do is just to ignore it.

Loyette thinks that it could be just the pressure of being in a war that is letting their minds all play tricks on them. But as time passes, he starts to wonder whether they experienced something going into that house that has attached onto them and does not want to let go.

This is an intense book that keeps the suspense coming, combining the horrors of being in war with supernatural horrors. The result is a page turner from John Milas that will have readers staying with the story until the end.