Book: The Curse of Lono

Overview
Hunter S. Thompson’s The Curse of Lono is a gonzo travelogue of Hawaii, published in 1983 and illustrated by longtime collaborator Ralph Steadman. It starts as a straightforward magazine assignment to cover the Honolulu Marathon and mutates into a feverish collage of reportage, myth, history, and self-satire. Through misadventure, intoxication, and a spiraling identification with the Hawaiian god Lono, Thompson turns a sports story into an inquiry about conquest, tourism, and the hazards of believing your own legend.

Setting and Premise
Thompson lands in Honolulu to file dispatches on the marathon, bringing Steadman as companion and visual chronicler. Oahu’s beaches, Waikiki’s hotels, and the North Shore’s surf culture provide the immediate backdrop, but the narrative quickly spreads to the Big Island, Kona’s deep-sea fishing grounds and the stark lava fields near Kilauea. Thompson stitches the present to the past by invoking the arrival and death of Captain Cook, whose reception by Hawaiians during the Makahiki festival involved their god Lono. The book treats this history as an ominous echo chamber for the author’s own arrival as a brash outsider who is alternately welcomed, indulged, and threatened.

Narrative Arc
On the ground, Thompson is soon out of step with the assignment. He caroms between hotel bars, late-night drives, and attempts to gather enough detail to write about an endurance race he has little interest in running, watching, or celebrating. The marathon becomes a moving backdrop, a river of suffering bodies and corporate banners, while his focus swings to side quests. A deep-sea fishing trip turns mythic and grotesque, with a hard-fought catch mangled by sharks and transformed into a farce of trophies, bad luck, and recrimination. A pilgrimage to the volcano courts danger and omen, as he plays with taboos and decides that a personal curse has been invoked. The longer he stays, the more Thompson frames his misreadings, near-accidents, and close calls as evidence that Lono’s favor is fickle and that the island exacts a price for hubris.

Style and Structure
The book reads like a scrapbook: dispatches typed in panic, letters to editors, telegraphed pleas for more money or time, photographs, maps, and Steadman’s spattered, raging cartoons. Interleaved are passages from older chronicles of Hawaii, especially accounts of Cook’s final voyage, creating an oscillation between 18th- and 19th-century voices and Thompson’s late-20th-century frenzy. The narrative is elastic and unreliable: jokes turn into omens, mishaps mount into prophecy, and reportage slides into hallucination. Steadman’s images intensify the sense of collapse, caricaturing Thompson as a crazed demigod, puncturing the glamour of tourism, and visualizing the book’s volcanic pressure.

Themes
Thompson treats sport as ritual spectacle and tourism as a modern colonization: efficient, smiling, and ravenous. He taps the Lono myth as a way to interrogate how outsiders project themselves onto a place and how a culture bears or repels that projection. The “curse” becomes a metaphor for bad faith, for the American habit of arriving with money and appetite and calling it destiny. Underneath the slapstick and menace runs a fear of the sea, the surf, and the volcano, forces that do not negotiate. The book also lampoons the myth of journalistic objectivity; the copy he owes is forever contaminated by the adventures he prefers to chase.

Place in Thompson’s Work
Less linear than Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, The Curse of Lono pushes the gonzo method toward collage and self-mythology. It is both travel writing and its satire, a sports piece that devours its subject, and a cautionary farce about mistaking welcome for immunity. Steadman’s art and Thompson’s manic prose fuse into a portrait of paradise as a stage where history, commerce, and delirium collide.