The Castle

In the summer of 2023, nonfiction writer Jon Ronson wakes to alarming texts from his adult son Joel, who has just fled a stranger's home in Woodstock, Connecticut. Joel and three friends had been invited to what they believed was a castle party. Instead, they found a Gothic castle owned by Chris Mark, a man in his early sixties who announced he had gathered them for his self-produced reality show, "101 Princesses," in which he plays "the lord" searching for his queen. He dressed the women in princess costumes from his basement, which also housed a hot-tub grotto and a pole-dancing nightclub. When Joel's group refused to participate, Chris ordered them to leave. One of the young women who stayed behind, Ari, later tells Ronson by phone that Chris identified Hugh Hefner as one of his idols and told his videographer that only Chris was permitted to sleep with the women in the house.

Sixteen days after colon surgery, Ronson drives to the castle. During a tour of the darkened interior, Chris explains that he recruits women through dating apps and coaxes them into sexual relationships with each other, a process he calls "Princessing." He admits his bipolar disorder contributed to building the castle and complains that women's rights have made his Hefner-inspired lifestyle more difficult: "With all these women's rights, it's different now" (27). When Chris retrieves a nondisclosure agreement from a drawer full of identical copies and asks Ronson to sign, Ronson refuses and leaves.

Chris then bombards Ronson with dozens of threatening texts, including a message stating he will send friends he says had been in prison "for killing somebody" (31). The Connecticut State Police confirm that Chris is the subject of an active investigation. A woman named Josie contacts Ronson with recordings from her own time at the castle. She describes how Chris lured her through Seeking Arrangement, a sugar-daddy website, with promises to fix her teeth and fund her education, then pressured her relentlessly for sex, once calling a worker to the castle claiming an "emergency" that was actually her refusal to sleep with him. Ronson also meets Charles Cady, Chris's longtime friend and construction manager, who characterizes Chris as "completely harmless" and dismisses the women's complaints as those of "gold diggers and all kinds of predators" (53). When pressed, Charles admits Chris's pestering "could well be" true but insists he has "no concerns about him actually crossing a line" (55).

The investigation prompts Ronson to broaden his inquiry into a wider crisis of male purposelessness. He meets economist Richard Reeves, author of Of Boys and Men, whose research shows that 6.7 million American men aged 25 to 54 are not working and not even looking for jobs. Ronson travels to East Chicago, Indiana, to visit Marktown, a utopian community Chris's great-grandfather Clayton Mark built for his steelworkers in the early twentieth century. Designed as a replica of an English village, Marktown once thrived with street dances and communal purpose. By the time Ronson visits, the town is nearly abandoned, hollowed out by a refinery explosion, pollution, gang violence, and automation that reduced mill employment from 30,000 to a few thousand. Ronson connects the decline to research by Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton, who identified hundreds of thousands of "excess deaths" among middle-aged white Americans without college degrees, caused not by poverty but by "the erosion of a way of life" (77). The Mark family fared far better: Wealth passed through generations until Chris built the castle.

Ronson profiles Greg Chism, a single father from the depressed factory town of Granite City, Illinois, who overcame cardiac emergencies, nearly $200,000 in medical debt, and abandonment by his wife to become the world's first YouTube lawn care influencer. Greg's success led him to create a family channel called Toy Freaks, featuring increasingly exaggerated skits with his daughters, including the "Bad Baby" series. His most-watched video received 622 million views. When YouTube launched its Kids app in 2015 using algorithms rather than human curators, Greg's content was grouped with genuinely disturbing knockoff videos in a scandal called #Elsagate. Online detectives accused Greg of child abuse; police raided his home, and YouTube banned his channel. Greg fell into depression and became a recluse.

Ronson examines how vulnerability has been marketed as the solution to men's struggles, from Brené Brown's viral 2010 TEDx Talk to the "Doofus Man" in advertising, where men are reliably portrayed as hapless buffoons. A 2024 study of 750 young men finds their fictional role models are exclusively superheroes, while their top request is for portrayals of "men who are emotionally vulnerable and open about their feelings" (169). Ronson also profiles British YouTuber Andrew Gold, who transformed his channel into anti-woke culture war material after learning to build audiences by identifying enemies for communities to unite against, and who admits privately that he does not believe the positions he broadcasts.

Ronson weaves in the story of his former friend Graham Linehan, creator of the sitcoms Father Ted and The IT Crowd, whose obsessive engagement with the trans rights debate on Twitter consumed his career and marriage. Graham called opponents "groomers" and directed followers to pile onto targets. The Father Ted musical was canceled; Graham refused a buyout and rewrote his will to prevent it from ever being staged. Ronson frames Graham's behavior through anomie, sociologist Émile Durkheim's term for the disorientation that follows when society's rules abruptly change, severing people from communal restraints. The story of Brandi Bragg, a West Virginia teenager who spiraled into addiction and died at 17 after her grandfather won $314 million in the lottery, illustrates how sudden disconnection from normal life can prove fatal.

Ronson reconnects with Chris in Fort Lauderdale, where Chris introduces his fiancée Leanne, a 24-year-old economics graduate from Kentucky. Chris attributes his earlier behavior to empty nest syndrome; Leanne praises him as "a complete and total gentleman" (145). They present plans for "Ark of Light," an orphanage on the castle grounds. Months later, however, Leanne messages Ronson: Chris has been arrested in Buenos Aires for gender-based violence against her, and the US embassy had to fly her home.

Charles Cady, now estranged from Chris, provides Ronson with 453 pages of texts spanning five years that reveal escalating behavior: seeking au pairs from multiple countries for unclear purposes, planning an adult-content studio, putting a deposit on a ship he considered converting into a floating brothel, and posting "Castle Rules" dictating that residents must "never say no to King Chris." Charles reveals that Chris is under investigation by multiple US federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Ronson draws parallels to other wayward scions of wealthy dynasties, including actor Armie Hammer and John du Pont, the DuPont heir who murdered a wrestler on his estate, noting that all three shared a sense of indestructibility rooted in their family names.

Leanne gives Ronson her full account, describing Chris coercing her into sharing his bed during months of travel and, on the night of his arrest, barricading the hotel room door, smashing her phone, and holding her down until she bit him and escaped. She also reveals Chris's connection to a Connecticut strip club whose owner was later indicted for facilitating prostitution. A confidential source leads Ronson to Nantucket to investigate the 2009 drowning of Chris's father, Gordon St. George Mark. A less-redacted police report confirms Chris was not on the capsized sailboat and had risked his life trying to save his father. Standing alone on a Nantucket beach on his wedding anniversary, Ronson confronts his own compulsive devotion to work, recognizing that every man in the book shares a dysfunctional relationship with purpose.

In the epilogue, set in late 2025, the DHS flies Leanne to Los Angeles for debriefing, confirming the federal investigation remains active. Ronson reports that elite agents who once investigated sex trafficking are being reassigned to assist Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deportation operations. Argentine forensic psychiatrists evaluate Chris and declare him inimputable, a legal designation meaning he cannot understand the criminal nature of his conduct, and he is released. As of February 2026, Chris has not been charged in the United States, but the investigation remains ongoing.