Refreshing, original and creepy

Elizabeth Hand's Hokula Road opens at a time that no one would describe as paradise: the start of the pandemic. The weather may have thawed, but 28-year-old Grady Kendall's life in rural Maine has frozen. So, when his brother sends him a Craigslist ad for a live-in caretaker on a billionaire's swanky Hawaiian island property, Grady applies — and lands it.

Wes Minton, the hedge funder-turned-conservationist, Zooms Grady in the middle of the night, asks whether he has ever performed an appendectomy on himself and emphasizes that he must arrive alone: But rich people are eccentric, right?

The warning flags are flying, but Grady heads to a fictional Hawaiian island anyway. On the plane, he chats up UCLA graduate student Jessica Kiyoko, who's shocked he's headed out to notoriously treacherous Hokuloa Road and the land Minton's made into a private wildlife refuge.

What he understands fast is that the Hawaii welcoming him is not the surf flick of his dreams. The caretaker who has been filling in, Dalita Nakoa, tells Grady about human bones sticking out of coral reefs, and shows him unhoused people high on meth, nearly empty hotels and grocery stores, and an abandoned bunker, one of its walls painted with the names of the missing.

“People disappear here,” she warns. And that's in good times. These times are anything but.

However, life is still grand for Wes Minton. He inherited his vast volcanic land and was going to turn the nearly inaccessible peninsula into a luxury resort but seems content just roaring around in his Tesla admiring birds, like a secretive, moneyed Boy Scout.

Somehow, Grady keeps his New England chill — until he starts encountering the supernatural, the animals, the spirits that Jessie had mentioned — by the way, she's disappeared.

Suddenly, he feels his sense of purpose: to find Jessie, to understand why people go missing.

Over decades, Hand has proved she's eclectic, genre-bending and comfortable in fantasy, mystery, crime, myth, magic — and more. Hokuloa Road, is refreshingly and originally creepy.