Jon Ronson’s new book crashed suddenly into his life.

One morning, he woke up to a flurry of texts that his son, Joel, had sent late the night before. He read them in reverse order, starting with the last one.

“We left. Was completely fucked. All good now.”

Jon sat bolt upright and read through the earlier messages. It turns out Joel and some friends had been lured to a mysterious castle in Connecticut on the promise of a cool party. When they arrived, they quickly realised there was no party. Instead, a strange man announced that they were to take part in the filming of a new reality TV format, called 101 Princesses – in which he would be a lord and would choose from 101 princesses – before being led to the basement where they’d be fitted with costumes.

Joel and his friends were assured that while the production hadn’t been picked up by a TV network yet, it would almost certainly appear on Netflix. Joel began to doubt the seriousness of the production, not least because the videographer appeared to be carrying out lots of strange duties, including operating the camera and the lights, and cutting up a slab of meat for the strange man.

Eventually, sensing that the group weren’t taking 101 Princesses entirely seriously, the man became irritable and sent the videographer to tell them all to leave. That, says Jon, was his cue to go in.

The strange man turned out to be Chris Mark, the 60-odd-year-old great-grandson of a Gilded Age steel tycoon called Clayton Mark.

Chris had used some of his inherited fortune to build an enormous castle and provide a ‘fairytale childhood’ for his two daughters… but was otherwise spiralling. He was using the castle like his own Playboy Mansion, during what Jon observes is the worst time in history to be Hugh Hefner.

Jon meets Chris at the start of what becomes a gripping, funny, tragic, strange and deeply human exploration of a world of unravelling men. From men who are unmoored by a lack of purpose in a fracturing world, to men whose better judgement has been hijacked by the algorithm, to men who have given up all pretence of restraint and have ripped off their face – “rip away any semblance of polite, mannered civility.”

The Castle is classic Jon Ronson. It humanises some of the most compelling trends of our times, as the decaying of our old institutions leaves us unmoored, often without purpose or community.

I have spent a long time thinking about these trends – I talk about them a lot in the stories I work on, and share with you here on this website – and yet Jon still managed to surprise and shock me in this new book.

I spoke to Jon last week, and you can watch the interview here. Disclaimer: I don’t write the captions or the title.