It deepens like a coastal shelf
I clicked on a link because it offered a link of 6 of fiction's most dysfunctional families (though the piece itself seems to go for phosphorescent allure), and it included Brideshead Revisited, and 5 crime novels I have never even heard of. OK, the column does start off by at least name-checking VC Andrews, of whom I have heard, though never read (just slightly the wrong generation, I think?).
But who would I put on a list of dysfunctional fictional families?
Well, the Starkadders, obvs, pre the arrival of Flora Poste.
Patrick Melrose's family.
In the realm of man handing on misery to man over several generations in particularly baroque ways (even if both are set pre-baroque era), both of Dunnett's sequences have form, no?
In the case of Agatha Christie, it's more a question of making a short-list among the contenders...
Having been lately thinking about Jane Duncan, Her Friends the MacLeans were pretty bad, and as I recall there were some other fairly toxic families throughout the stories.
EM Delafield has some spectacularly awful dysfunctional families in her novels: I was thinking of Humbug which was the one I read most recently but then I thought of spineless ineffectual charmer Mark East in Tension with his institutionalised dipsomaniac wife and his children who one might diagnose as acting out familial awfulness. But there are others.
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