Something of a Calling
by Zoje Stage
Blackstone Publishing
pub date: 15-Sept-2026
Publisher’s Summary:
From the brilliant Zoje Stage, Bram Stoker Award finalist and author of Baby Teeth, Something of a Calling is an unsettling look at a woman—and a world—on the brink of change.
Detective Andy Cooper is about to retire. She isn’t sure what’s next … perhaps traveling in the RV she has yet to buy, with a dog she doesn’t currently own. Perhaps gardening near the ever-shrinking patch of woods behind her house—once the cable company’s backhoe is removed.
She’ll need to do something, if only to distract herself from how empty her life has become. After the murder of her young daughter by a drunk driver. After the divorce. After the realization that all she has is her job and that she’s about to lose that, too.
Everything changes when bodies begin to turn up. Murdered, but how? Not by knife, gun, or any obvious weapon. Instead: teethmarks. Chunks missing. Like they’d been chewed on. And not by humans.
As she’s struggling to solve her final case, an unexpected new friendship seems like just what Andy needs. Where she is detached from life, Fiona embraces it. Where she is a homebody, Fiona roams. Yet the women are drawn together by a shared love of nature and wildlife. Until Andy learns the dark truth behind Fiona’s smile. A secret that threatens to unravel the world as she knows it.
Review:
I read this in two sittings which is unheard of for my slow reading style! While this book is technically an eco-horror, there’s little gore and only a couple startling scares. I’m easily scared. This is a mystery, in my opinion. Zoje Stage has written an epitome of Man vs Nature theme.
I’ve never read her work before. In fact, credit to where it’s due, what grabbed my attention was the cover. Not shocking. It happens to a lot of people. In comics, every printing gets a new cover and then, there are issues that have several covers just so people can collect them. The cover here is a white-tailed deer apparently on paper with bloody shreds ripping the paper apart. I love our deer friends.
Humans destroying the natural world propelling wildlife to evolve and fight back is meant to have readers question who the villain of the story is. Is the villain the killer or the person who participates in a wide industrial complex that feeds on greed? Detective Andy Cooper is assigned one case in her jurisdiction. However, she’s the one who discovered a body in a lake in her jurisdiction which gets assigned to someone else. There’s something peculiar about them that makes Andy and the medical examiner feel they are loosely related.
In the acknowledgments and an interview with the YouTube channel podcast, Booked, Stage talks about having a small (one acre) empty lot behind her house in Pennsylvania. She started with feeding the birds and giving them water then noticed how other animals utilized her offering. She is emotional and vested in seeing the animals grow their families and how they behave. This is exactly what I do! If ever there was a book written to my heart, it’s this one.
Until I saw the Booked interview, I thought perhaps Stage was British because of a couple details. One seemed like an error that an editor should have caught–her use of “mum” with one particular side story. Andy does have her junior detective partner, Mira, look into strange cases like theirs and they do find a global occurrence, but of those side stories, only one identifies a location which is Pasadena, California.
The other thing that pulled me out (no, not mutating animals), was the protagonist, Andy–a police detective north of Pittsburgh–and her relationship with her firearm. I’ve lived in western NJ most of my life and one year in Pittsburgh, in fact. People here love their firearms. I also know a law enforcement officer is going to be strapped every second except when they shower.
In a house, in a deli, on duty, on a ferry, at a diner, at soccer games, in a church, by campfire flames.
People with permits to carry always carry. And, I was married to a cop and learned intimately about hidden ankle and waistband holsters. They are always packing.
Does Stage make this decision for Andy intentionally? I don’t know. Andy has development over the course of the book and it rolls out at a digestible pace. By the end, if she didn’t want her gun, it would have made more sense than from the very beginning. Andy says (internally) all she ever wanted was to fix things, but becoming a cop isn’t the only–or even the best–way. Andy could have been the medical examiner piecing together the mysteries of the two bodies found in a short span of time. She could have been a character who saw enough victims of gun violence to be turned off by them.
Despite the gun issue, Andy is an incredible protagonist. She exudes compassion for the earth from the moment readers meet her. She’s smart as hell and excellent at her job. She’s known deeply tragic grief from her daughter being killed by a drunk driver. Her marriage fell apart afterward. She’s a shell of a human being. Her only connections come from her time out in nature whether sitting to look at stars or kayaking. She notices the deer in her own backyard. Later, she finds a fawn. She wants to connect to animals more than people which is explicitly stated in her inner monologue. People generally don’t feel like they fit in the puzzle of Andy’s composition.
Then, she meets a traveling woman named Fiona and befriends her. Instead of judging her as a vagrant, Andy welcomes this stranger into her home. Fiona explains that she’s Ace (of the LGBTQIA2S+) and that friendship is the highest form of relationship between people. Andy hasn’t had a friend in so long that she wants Fiona to be a trusting person. Her police investigator instincts make her question her decisions to allow this stranger easy access to her life and home. Fiona also has a penchant for smiling in a big way. Andy hasn’t been happy in years. When she finds herself smiling back at Fiona, readers will likely wonder if Andy is becoming too vulnerable. Is this new friend actually a dangerous killer or an accomplice? That’s what unfolds through the third act.
Don’t skip the Acknowledgements. This is a real letter from the author with a lot more than paragraphs of names to be thanked. You don’t want to miss these behind-the-scenes details.
Summary:
Zoje Stage presents a murder mystery with an unexpected twist where Mother Nature fights back against humans who have destroyed everything good on the planet. Protagonist Andy Cooper is the lucky detective assigned to a murder case that has bizarre similarities to a body she found but is not assigned to investigate. Andy has lived with a hollow heart since the death of her six-year-old daughter. The void feels too powerful to ever connect with anyone or anything again. Her small moments of serenity are being disrupted by land developers and expanding utilities. She worries about the wildlife and plants just as much as she’s angry about her own loss of peace. A strange woman appears in her neighborhood. Andy feels something for the first time in ages. She immediately feels trust and kindness. Fiona becomes a friend quickly in a suspicious way. Andy struggles with what’s right according to her job as a Major Crimes detective versus what’s right for the natural world. Are some killings justifiable to save the greater good? Does Fiona have a part in these deaths?
Readers shouldn’t be disappointed by Zoje Stage’s phenomenal tale, Something of a Calling. The chapters make it easy to be in the appropriate character’s head, including an animal’s perspective. There aren’t any typical big police action scenes. It’s the kind of book that is shelved under horror, but feels too nuanced. There’s tension, for sure. There are maulings, deaths, and short panic-induced experiences. What you call it depends on whether your brain interprets the story like Alfred Hitchcock or Hayao Miyazaki.
Rating: 4.75 stars
For fans of movies like THE BIRDS; comic books like THE WILDS (2019); and, other Man vs Nature plots. The difference is you end up rooting for the animals in this. Also, if you tend to relate to characters like Poison Ivy, Man-Thing, Swamp Thing, etc.
This review was possible through NetGalley.
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of AmberUnmasked.com and Vodka O'Clock Podcast. Author of The Farrah Wethers Mysteries, comic book short stories, prose, and non-fiction. Cosplayer and figure model.