Zoje Stage’s newest book offers a thrilling modern take on an ancient ideal. “Something of a Calling,” which is available beginning Sept. 15 from Blackstone Publishing, encourages readers to rethink their relationship to animals and the spaces shared with humans.
Stage’s story follows small-town detective Andy Cooper during the final week of her decades-long career. Readers are quickly told that the western Pennsylvanian sleuth, who has spent almost as much time solving cases as burying her own grief, comes across a body with strange bite marks. As the chapters, which Stage marks by dates, unfold, the gruesome body count grows. Ultimately, Cooper’s swan song becomes as much a quest to solve a crime as it is to rectify bionomic quirks.
Stage, a Pittsburgh-based Jewish author whose previous books have garnered international acclaim for their ability to entertainingly terrorize audiences, said she opted for an alternative approach for her newest work.
There’s an “intentionality” that went into writing the book, she said. “I’m not subtle in the point that I’m making, and I’m not trying to be.”
The deliberateness marking “Something of a Calling” was generated by a sense that readers required more than mere amusement, she said. “I love entertainment as much as the next person, but as a creator, it’s really hard to deal with everything that’s happening every day in the world. It’s just overwhelming.”
Since moving into her Squirrel Hill home during the pandemic, Stage has regularly observed a peregrine falcon, deer, cardinals, groundhogs and squirrels in her backyard.
The collective is this “amazing thing that I get to witness outside my window.” But while it is “magical,” there is this “constant worry and this hyper-awareness that the world that they’re living in, which is the world that we’ve dominated, is so not safe for them,” she said.
Too often, ecological realities have been ignored or shunned, she continued. “It’s almost mind-boggling the degree to which people have forgotten or are blind to the fact that we need all the species that exist on this earth because they all serve a vital purpose.”
Preserving habitats is part of Stage’s compositional push; midway through the text, Stage deepens the call. As Cooper traces the path of mysterious deaths, she encounters a dead fawn on the side of the road. The experience elicits an unexpectedly emotional reaction from an otherwise stoic detective.
Not just another carcass, the fallen fawn “reminds her of her own losses in her life,” Stage told the Chronicle. Encountering that deer is a reminder that “it’s someone’s dead child…and I know a lot of people don’t think of animals on that level, but animals feel pain. It’s a very real thing. Animals mourn their losses just like we do.”
Stage’s message is a familiar echo — weeks ago many synagogue-goers heard a biblical imperative imploring passersby to shoo away a mother bird before taking its young.
Writing in “The Guide for the Perplexed,” Maimonides, a 12th-century scholar, said the commandment must be appreciated: “There is no difference in this case between the pain of man and the pain of other living beings, since the love and tenderness of the mother for her young ones is not produced by reasoning, but by imagination, and this faculty exists not only in man but in most living beings.”
Days before Stage’s newest work is released, the writer said her text is unmistakably purposeful. For years, Stage has enabled readers to visit twisted psyches in print. “Something of a Calling” broadens the writer’s aims by asking readers to question their own consciousness.
Whether through fictional characters or fabricated events in a western Pennsylvanian setting, the reality is clear, Stage explained.
“We’ve been such horrible neighbors to all the creatures that we share the world with,” she said. “Nature isn’t something that exists somewhere else. We’re in it all the time. We’re in it. It’s right here. But humanity has treated the world like we’re the only ones that matter.”
Failure to recognize responsibilities can reap horror beyond any literary construction, she continued. “We live in a beautiful world in which we’re not the only sentient creatures. We should have as much compassion for our animal neighbors as we do for human neighbors.” PJC
Adam Reinherz can be reached at areinherz@pittsburghjewishchronicle.org.
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