The Curse of Lono

The Curse of Lono is a book by Hunter S. Thompson, first published in 1983, that describes his experiences in Hawaii in 1980. Thompson was commissioned by a running magazine to cover the Honolulu Marathon that year, and he travelled with the illustrator Ralph Steadman. The account follows Thompson's gonzo method, weaving his own experiences, excesses and reflections into the coverage of the race and his time on the island.

After the marathon, the group settles into a rented house on Hawaii's Kona coast, where bad weather and huge waves keep them confined indoors. Steadman's family returns to England, unhappy with the vacation, and Thompson later meets a man named Ackerman, who seems to have links to the drug trade, and goes fishing with him. When Thompson catches a large marlin and declares himself Lono, the ancient Hawaiian god, the locals are upset and he goes into hiding in the City of Refuge. The narrative regularly breaks away to excerpts from Richard Hough's The Last Voyage of Captain James Cook, about the explorer whom native Hawaiians came to regard as Lono's reincarnation.

The book was poorly received. Thompson struggled to write it because of his dependence on alcohol and other drugs, and his editor had to rescue a partly written manuscript. The finished text is uneven and often incoherent, and was padded with quotations from other books. After a brief initial run it was not reprinted until 2005, in a signed limited edition, and later in a wider release.