"The Militia House"

John Milas is the author of the new novel The Militia House. He enlisted in the US Marine Corps at age nineteen and subsequently deployed to the Helmand Province of Afghanistan in support of OEF 10.1. He was honorably discharged from active service in 2012.

After his discharge, Milas earned both his BA and MFA in creative writing. As a student, he studied with writers such as Marianne Boruch, Roxane Gay, Brian Leung, Robert Lopez, Terese Marie Mailhot, Julie Price Pinkerton, Donald Platt, Sharon Solwitz, and others.

Milas applied the Page 69 Test to The Militia House and reported the following:

All four of the main characters are mentioned on page 69 of The Militia House, which includes three complete paragraphs and some change. They have just returned from their initial excursion to the eponymous haunted house and are coming to terms with the experience. Vargas examines a souvenir that he's brought out with him as Blount tries to take a nap. Johnson is outside behind the team's living quarters smoking a cigarette when the narrator, Corporal Loyette, asks to see the photos on Johnson's digital camera. However, all of the files on Johnson's SD card have been corrupted. When he takes a new photo he finds the camera now works properly.

This test works great for The Militia House for a number of reasons. In the most superficial way, the three paragraphs describe a self-contained moment, more or less, following the previous page and preceding the next one. More importantly, this self-contained moment at least allows for the potential to be unsettling. Sure, as a luddite myself I could be persuaded to believe that a digital camera in 2010 was able to corrupt files on its memory card at random, but in the context of the book this is a moment where we could also assume something supernatural is occurring. maybe. For me, this is a great page to serve as kind of a movie trailer moment for the book because it reflects on the type of influence The Turn of the Screw had in the way Henry James leans on ambiguity as spooky stuff happens. My hope is for The Militia House to get under readers' skin in the tradition of Henry James and Shirley Jackson, so this page does well in representing the whole of the book's project.

Visit John Milas's website.

Q&A with John Milas.

My Book, The Movie: The Militia House.

--Marshal Zeringue