Jon Ronson writes books about the same dark corners of the world that Louis Theroux explores in his documentaries. This time, his subject is toxic masculinity, anti-wokeness, shouting on social media, male anger, sexual deviancy and just plain weirdos. The Castle: Adventures in a World of Unravelling Men by Jon Ronson takes us deep into a world whose contours we glimpse in the comments sections on social media. It’s ugly, shocking, utterly mad – and at times, very, very funny.

Ronson wakes up one morning to find disconcerting text messages from his twenty-something son. The previous night, his son had gone to what he thought would be a party at a faux Gothic-style castle in Connecticut. It turns out it was more like a recruiting event of young women to satisfy the insatiable sexual appetite of the castle owner’s owner, Chris Mark, a middle-aged heir to a steel fortune. Mark fancies himself a latter-day Hugh Hefner whose main purpose in life is to lure young women into his bed, whatever it takes. Disgusting as this is, unfortunately, there’s nothing particularly new about this kind of man. They’ve been lurking around since time immemorial.

What I found more fascinating, though, were the men who start out seemingly normal, only to find themselves sucked into an absurd online world of clicks, trolling, abuse and increasingly extreme views.

Greg Chism is one such character: a single dad with two young daughters living an uneventful American Midwest life. He starts out making YouTube videos about lawn mowing before moving on to harmless home videos with his kids. To his astonishment, the videos generate astronomical numbers of views. The more violent and weird the content, the more views he gets. ‘Bad Baby Real Food Fight Victoria vs Annabell & Freak Daddy Toy Freaks Family’ racks up an incredible 622 million. The people at YouTube love him – until they don’t.

Then there’s Graham Linehan, a former friend of Ronson’s and script writer of successful TV series Father Ted. Following Graham’s increasingly erratic tweets about transgender people, Ronson asks Linehan to remove his endorsement on Linehan’s upcoming book, whereupon hell breaks loose on social media. As Ronson aptly describes it, Twitter is like ‘walking into a bar fight’.

There are many other men on the brink in this story. It’s never their fault, tough, always someone else having duped them, their upbringing, the money – too little or too much.

I wouldn’t read The Castle: Adventures in a World of Unravelling Men as a deep analysis of masculinity in our time. It’s more an entertaining (and yes, a bit sad) account of mad parts of the world we live in.  It’s a bit too much all over the place for the former, but definitely very good read for the latter.

The Castle: Adventures in a World of Unravelling Men by Jon Ronson is published by Viking, 320 pages.