Filed Under: Gonzo on Trial
Hunter S. Thompson was sent to Hawaii to cover a marathon. He came back with The Curse of Lono, a strange collision of reporting, drugs, Hawaiian history, and Ralph Steadman’s unmistakable art.
Paul Perry made a beautiful mistake on May 23, 1980.
The executive editor of Running offered Hunter S. Thompson a good fee, paid expenses, and a trip to Honolulu. All Thompson had to do was cover a marathon.
Perry thought he was commissioning a sports story. What he actually gave Thompson was airfare, an expense account, and enough room to destroy the premise.
Bantam published The Curse of Lono three years later. Simon & Schuster is bringing it back on October 20 in a 224-page hardcover. Ralph Steadman’s illustrations fill the book. Natasha Lyonne provides a new introduction.
The publisher calls it a “cult counterculture masterpiece,” which sounds like someone trying to sell chaos from a clean desk.
This is a much dirtier book.
The assignment survives, but barely. Letters interrupt the story. Hawaiian history pushes into the trip. Hotel rooms, bad weather, and worse decisions keep pulling Thompson away from the marathon he was paid to cover.
Steadman is there to document the damage. His reds look like open wounds. His greens appear toxic. Black ink spreads across the islands like something that should have been contained.
His work is not decoration. It often tells the truth Thompson is trying to joke his way around.
Thompson and Steadman had been wrecking respectable journalism together since their 1970 Kentucky Derby assignment. That trip produced “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved” and helped create the form that became Gonzo.
By the time they reached Hawaii, Steadman knew Thompson too well to illustrate him literally. He drew the greed, panic, and appetite underneath the prose. When Thompson tried to charm his way past the damage, Steadman left the damage on the page.
Natasha Lyonne is a smart choice for the new introduction. She discovered Thompson at sixteen and understood what young writers have always found in his work. He gave them permission to enter the story and admit that the reporter changes the room.
Her introduction is personal and brief. She does not defend every ugly thing Thompson wrote, nor does she turn him into a lecture about acceptable behavior. She explains what his work unlocked for her and steps aside.
That leaves Thompson and Steadman to face the trouble they created.
The Honolulu Marathon was never the true destination. It was the respectable reason for the airfare. Perry even closed his letter to Thompson with the sentence that doomed the assignment:
“This is a good chance for a vacation.”
Any editor who wrote that line to Hunter S. Thompson had accepted the consequences.
Thompson brought Steadman into the mess with a letter full of promises no reasonable person would believe. They would enter the race and sprint the first three miles at a murderous pace. The trained runners behind them would panic and ruin themselves trying to keep up. Thompson also claimed he had entered Steadman in a world-class surfing contest.
It was a terrible plan, assuming it was ever a plan at all.
The story is already coming loose when Thompson boards the flight to Hawaii. A passenger locks himself in an airplane bathroom and comes out with one arm stained blue. The crew does not know what happened or what to do with him. Fear moves through the cabin before anyone understands what they are afraid of.
Thompson watches the reaction. That is the part people miss when they reduce him to drugs and hotel damage. He notices how quickly uncertainty becomes suspicion and how eagerly frightened people begin policing one another. The reporter is still working underneath the performance.
Honolulu gives him a legitimate story. The Dec. 7 race drew 6,829 starters, and 6,630 finished. Duncan Macdonald won the men’s race in 2:16:55. Patti Lyons Catalano won the women’s race in 2:35:26.
Thompson hears two races happening on the same road. The leaders move with a smooth hiss. Behind them comes the slap of thousands of shoes and the sound of people trying to survive something they volunteered to endure.
His question is simple:
“Why do those buggers run?”
The answer he develops has little to do with exercise.
Thompson connects the running boom to the political defeat that followed the 1960s. People who once believed they could change the country watched that belief collapse. Reagan was coming. The old movements were splintered. Running offered a private victory that could still be measured.
A stopwatch gave you a number even when the country gave you nothing.
Thompson respects the elite runners. He has less patience for the business growing behind everyone else. Shoes, shirts and slogans turn private suffering into merchandise. The runner earns the finish, then a company sells the triumph back to them.
Forty-six years later, the machine is more efficient. The stopwatch became an app. The private victory became content.
After the race, Thompson and Steadman leave Honolulu for the Kona Coast. They want calm water and a quiet place to finish the assignment.
They do not find either one.
The weather turns hostile. The costs climb. Local operators circle the visitors until the visitors begin running schemes of their own. Going further into the plot would steal some of the book’s best ambushes.
Thompson also becomes obsessed with Lono. The Hawaiian god is associated with rain and fertility. Makahiki is dedicated to Lono and traditionally marks a season of peace, agriculture and renewal.
He does not approach that history with care. Thompson barges into it carrying mainland money, drugs, an expense account and a reputation that needs constant feeding.
The Hawaii in these pages is not a postcard. Real estate money presses against sacred land. Tourists arrive expecting service. Mainland visitors behave as if the islands were built for their escape.
Thompson recognizes the ugliness because he is participating in it. Someone else is paying him to turn local people into material. He attacks the mainland appetite for Hawaii while feeding his own.
Writer William Stephenson described Thompson as a “branded American product” while examining the book’s treatment of American power in Hawaii.
That phrase cuts deeper than the publisher’s description. Thompson condemns the machine while cashing its checks.
By 1980, Hunter S. Thompson could no longer walk into a room by himself. The legend got there first. People expected guns, drugs, ruined hotels and impossible behavior. Editors expected it too.
Today they would call it a platform. Thompson had become a profitable version of himself long before every loud bastard with a phone started calling himself a brand. The performance paid for the trips, but it was eating the reporter.
Paul Perry later proposed training Thompson for a marathon. Indiana University preserves Perry’s printed account of what happened. The plan required Thompson to stop drinking and smoking. According to Perry, Thompson loved the idea.
His editor at Simon & Schuster did not.
Perry remembered the editor saying:
“If Hunter dries out, so does the public’s interest in him.”
That is Perry’s account of the meeting. The logic is ugly enough without embellishment. To that editor, a healthier Thompson threatened the product. The wreckage was easier to market.
The damaged version sold.
The Curse of Lono catches Thompson inside that transaction. The performance still produces great writing. It also forces him to keep raising the stakes for readers who arrived expecting the lunatic in the sunglasses.
Thompson understood the economics. He called journalism “a Ticket to Ride.” Magazine work rarely paid enough on its own, but it bought access. An assignment could put him inside the action while somebody else covered the expenses.
There was no spotless ideal behind it. Thompson wanted movement, access, and enough money to stay near the trouble. At least he admitted the bargain.
The book is assembled from whatever survived the trip. Letters become chapters. Historical accounts interrupt the narrative. Mark Twain appears alongside missionary William Ellis and historian Richard Hough. Each man arrived in Hawaii carrying an outsider’s assumptions.
The familiar story that Hawaiians received Captain James Cook as the returning god Lono also remains disputed. Anthropologists have fought over that interpretation for decades.
Thompson uses the story because it fits the myth he is building. Readers should not mistake that usefulness for settled history.
The original release did not charm everyone. Kirkus Reviews found flashes of inspired writing but concluded that Thompson’s familiar act had worn thin.
The review was harsh, but it saw the rut.
The Curse of Lono wanders whenever Thompson loses sight of a target. The book is strongest when he is reporting something real and weakest when the legend is expected to carry the story by itself. Anyone buying it as Fear and Loathing in Hawaii is buying the wrong book.
Steadman keeps it from becoming a Hunter Thompson tribute to Hunter Thompson.
Calling him the illustrator understates his role. He is the witness for the prosecution. When Thompson loses the story, Steadman drags it back by the throat.
Thompson can make cruelty sound funny. Steadman leaves it looking cruel. Bodies collapse into stains. Faces buckle under greed and appetite. Paradise looks infected by everyone who came to claim a piece of it.
The pictures share the joke without forgiving the man telling it.
PCM readers will notice how easily cannabis moves through the book. It arrives without a medical speech or a wellness sermon. No one stops the story to explain weed to respectable readers.
People smoke because they want to. They share it through trust and friendship. Cannabis also moves through the underground economy beneath the hotels and tourist packages.
The plant is neither villain nor confession. It is part of the world Thompson is reporting from.
Too much cannabis media now acts as if weed needs a lawyer, a doctor, and a marketing department in the room. Thompson lets it exist without pleading for approval. In these pages, the danger surrounding cannabis comes from prohibition, while the plant itself remains ordinary.
Alcohol and cocaine carry a different weight. They begin as part of the fun and gradually turn ugly. The intoxication becomes physical, desperate, and revolting. Thompson puts that change on the page even when he refuses to stop the ride.
The advance copy also retains language that will hit modern readers hard. Thompson uses racial, misogynistic, and anti-gay slurs. His treatment of Native Hawaiians can move from anger over colonial exploitation to cheap caricature within a few pages.
There is no point pretending otherwise.
Leaving the language intact is not an endorsement. It is an honest record of what Thompson wrote. A cleaned-up version would be bullshit.
The advance PDF could have used stronger historical context around the Hawaiian material. Lyonne’s introduction is personal rather than corrective, which leaves some of the book’s weakest historical assumptions largely untouched.
PCM has already argued that Gonzo was a method before it became a costume. The Curse of Lono catches the method being swallowed by the costume.
Thompson deserves better than coffee mugs and motivational posters covered in recycled quotations. He was a reporter with a vicious eye for power. He was also a man trapped inside a character that made everyone money.
At his best, Thompson could walk into a marathon and find political surrender hiding behind the finishers’ shirts. He could hear money protecting itself beneath good manners. When he aimed upward, the prose left teeth marks.
At his worst, he punched down and mistook contempt for honesty. Sometimes the joke was only cruel.
Both versions are in this book.
The Curse of Lono is uneven, excessive, and occasionally lost. Those flaws are not something to explain away. They are part of the work Thompson and Steadman made.
Simon & Schuster is asking $35 for the hardcover. PCM reviewed an advance PDF, so we cannot judge the paper or binding. For an illustrated hardcover at that price, the limitation is significant.
The PDF does show why Steadman needs space. His images interrupt Thompson, take over pages, and refuse to behave like decoration. Lyonne offers a useful entrance without pretending Thompson needs to be made safe before anyone walks through it.
Do not read The Curse of Lono to learn who won the Honolulu Marathon. The official results can answer that in seconds.
Read it because Thompson took the assignment hostage, Steadman drew the ransom note, and nobody walked out clean.
The Curse of Lono by Hunter S. Thompson. Illustrated by Ralph Steadman. Introduction by Natasha Lyonne. Simon & Schuster. 224 pages. Hardcover. $35. Publication date: October 20, 2026. ISBN 9780684873176.
Disclosure: Pot Culture Magazine received an advance PDF of The Curse of Lono from Simon & Schuster for editorial consideration.
© 2026 Pot Culture Magazine. All rights reserved. This content is the exclusive property of Pot Culture Magazine and may not be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission from the publisher, except for brief quotations in critical reviews.
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