Jon Ronson has spent years chronicling the more improbable manifestations of what Philip Roth called the American berserk. He is the author of many non-fiction bestsellers, including The Men Who Stare at Goats (2004) and The Psychopath Test (2011), and as a result is now living the dream of every hack who has ever posted on LinkedIn about their ‘brand’. But in his latest book we find him out of sorts. Settled in upstate New York, he sometimes sits in his local park among the loners and the desperados, trying to come up with ideas. ‘Unless inspiration immediately strikes, I’m invariably overwhelmed by a dreadful thought: I’m just a man sitting on a bench,’ he writes. He compares himself to millions of men who are ‘underemployed and flailing, looking for something, anything, to fill the void’. 

Ronson’s maunderings are interrupted by a genuine problem. A grown-up son and his friends have been invited to a party at a castle in Connecticut owned by a man who says he makes online content featuring young women as princesses. This man appears to be taking an unwelcome interest in the girls in Ronson Jr’s posse. It is all rather worrying for Ronson as a dad (though in fact nothing happens) but stimulating for Ronson the journo. He admits that when he wrote a regular diary for The Guardian about family life, he hoped something bad would befall them all to ginger up the copy.

Ronson arranges to meet the man in the castle, Chris Mark, who turns out to be the great-grandson of a Gilded Age steel baron. Mark fancies himself as a second Hugh Hefner. Like Hef, he keeps heavy drapes drawn to shut out the passing of time. He can be manipulative