The Settings

For me, the setting where a story takes place is a big deal. People act differently in different locations. There are different rules, different expectations. Take a stable person, put them in an unstable environment, and all hell breaks loose. And if they’re not stable to begin with…

“The setting sets the stage for what comes next, and almost determines it.” —John Steinbeck

We arrive on an uncharted island in the Hawaiian archipelago. Once a fruit plantation, where locals lived and worked and died at the whims of a colonial corporation, it’s now a playground for the ultra-rich. A place where the elite go to forget about their troubles. And possibly create new ones.

Adapting to these new surroundings becomes a colossal challenge for Mia, who goes from living in her car in a parking lot to vacationing at a luxury resort on this secret island. A fish-out-of-water, surrounded by sharks.

“It’s place that interests me—and the social and economic situation in a place—how people live, how they make their living, the culture—but the story comes from place.” —Annie Proulx

At one end of the island: a luxurious hotel sprouting out of the jungle, where the wealthy spend their days dining, drinking, and debauching. At the other end: Mia’s hut and the private mansion of a reclusive Hollywood outcast. Between the two is the beach where everything goes wrong…

I pictured Mia’s hut as a window-filled structure on a boardwalk, perched right over the ocean. The inside has different spaces—a kitchenette area, a lounge area, a corner separated with a tatami screen for the bedroom. Intimate, yet open. Refined, yet relaxed. Qualities that are very unlike her.

Next door to the hut, the reclusive Zora’s mansion is almost like an open dollhouse. A private paradise tucked away behind a dense wall of bamboo, where she lives like a tropical bird in a beautiful cage.

The hotel Paradaiso is a private playground for the ultra-rich, where phones are locked away for the privacy of all its entitled guests. No request is too big, or too small—or too strange—for the staff. Comfort, at any cost. And every indiscretion discretely ignored.

Select guests are shuttled to Zora’s exclusive parties via chartered yacht—which also offers big-game fishing, for those with an appetite to go far out in the open waters and hunt apex marine predators.

But the jungle surrounding the hotel is not advised. For beyond the plantation barracks, where it’s said the ghosts of slaves still roam, are the perilous cliffs that keep calling… calling…

The cliffs, the beach, the hotel, the hut, the island itself… all of these locations cast a spell over the people there. People who do things—terrible things—that weren’t part of any agenda. Well, maybe one agenda…

“A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.” —Joan Didion