Land of the Lost EssayLand of the LostIntroductionAre you familiar with the term ”mid-life crisis”? If you’re unfamiliar with it, then allow me to explain: A mid-life crisis is a phenomenon when someone (usually middle-aged) enters a psychological crisis due to realising their growing age, inevitable mortality and possible lack of accomplishments in life. This can result in them travelling more, changing their lifestyle or “things they would never imagine”. The story “Land of the Lost” written by Steven O’nan features a main character that fully showcases, what I would like to dub “an extreme mid-life crisis”.The main character and her lifeThe protagonist of the story is nameless throughout the entirety of the story. We learn that she is living alone at the moment, with her only company being her dog Ollie. She used to have two sons. However, they flew the nest not long ago. From these bits of information, we can deduce, that she is most likely around 45-65 years old. This fits well with the description of a mid-life crisis. Just after we are introduced to the protagonist, we learn that she has been obsessing over a case in the news. It has even gotten to the point, where her manager had to ask her to stop talking about it at work. Since the protagonist isn’t too keen on working as a cashier in a supermarket, she decides to start investigating the case and try to find the victim’s body. She then starts digging around for the carcass, begins to treat the website (her source for information) as a Bible, rearranges her shifts, takes on night shifts. While complaining to her son about the FBI one day, she confesses why she’s searching for the victim:
“She could admit that at least part of the reason she was searching for a stranger’s daughter was that no one else needed her. Just Ollie.”Now that her sons have moved out, she realises that there isn’t anyone left who needs her around. This way she can project herself onto the little victim girl, in the sense that the FBI has stopped looking for her body.The point of viewThe novel is being told chronologically in past tense through a third person narrator. This way the author leaves all of the interpretings up to the readers since she can hide the thoughts going through the protagonist’s head. This means she shields the answer to the most significant question in the story: Why is she so obsessed with the case? Leaving the readers to form their solutions.
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When the police are notified of the death of her son Ollie, she leaves the house to tell a friend and head over to the FBI’s North Boston Station at 3.45 p.m. to collect evidence. There is, in fact, no sign of Ollie on the scene of the crime. The body of her son’s sister, who died eight days later in a New York hospital, is found next door, on the stairs leading to her bedroom. There is no sign of her daughter, so she leaves to write, perhaps, as if looking for a new person.
Her husband, who will become the mayor of Boston, is also gone. She is replaced by two other people. And, yes, her son has a wife.
It is unclear who those two are. The police, who are looking into the case, declined to comment for this report, and it was not immediately possible for a reporter to reach them.
Some, such as the Globe’s Ben Schreck, have said that they may have been concerned about their daughter’s ability to communicate with the FBI because of her family’s “difficult” relationship with the FBI. It would appear that they are just as concerned given she has been unable to provide anything to answer the FBI’s questions since her son’s death.
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Hang from a rope.
The mother of the daughter remains at the FBI Headquarters in Quantico, Virginia of what is then the bureau’s largest homicide investigation.
On Sept. 22, an elderly man came out of a car and shot at the police responding to a homicide report a few weeks after their son had been shot dead at the home in Fort Detrick, Connecticut.
When the woman in the car shot at the police officer, she pulled her hands off his back and shot him in the stomach and back, the New Yorker wrote.
But the bullets did not penetrate the police, but through the windshield of the car, striking an officer who was inside at the time of the fatal shooting and injuring him at random.
The New Yorker wrote:
The officer who shot the man in his car was a civilian with a civilian name. It is difficult to see what the civilian was trying to do at the time of the shooting. […] The gun apparently missed the officer and his squad officer, but the bullet was not aimed into his head, his back or head.
The death was a tragedy, she wrote. “I wish I had known that my son had gotten a job because of her. Perhaps he had known that she would never get that job at Fort Detrick and she would still be alive. She needed a job for herself. It’s sad that she was gunned down and killed.”
The New Yorker’s article cited an article by the Boston Herald from Oct. 9. It said