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Big Screwed Up Family / Literature

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  • The 39 Clues has the Cahill family. Nearly every influential historical figure born in or after the 16th century is related to them (by blood or marriage), and quite a few of the family members are extremely rich and powerful. The family is big enough to be divided into four rival branches, which formed from the descendants of the four original Cahill children, as well as the Madrigal branch, which is made up of people descended from Madeline Cahill, the fifth sibling, and members of other branches who wish for peace. Most of the time, the four branches are spying on or trying to kill each other, and even individual family branches experience internal conflicts a good deal of the time.
  • Being full of proud West Virginia hillbillies the town of Grantville, transposed to 1632 thanks to alien carelessness, has lots of these, not to mention being home to some seriously tangled family trees. This turns out to be one of the few things they have in common with the aristocracy of their new time.
  • Accomplishments of the Duke's Daughter: The Royal Family is a mess. There's a succession crisis, the current Queen killed the previous one and is trying to kill her stepchildren, the older prince is a Broken Bird with trust issues after losing his mother and him and his sister being failed by their dad, the younger prince is a Royal Brat disliked by his half siblings and the King is too weak willed to do anything about any of this. And this was before Edward got engaged to a girl who is a moron at best and a Gold Digger at worst with increasing hints suggesting she is a spy.
  • The Accursed Kings interlaces two of them, the small d'Artois and the much larger French Royal Family (including its laces to other European regnant families), and runs on it for seven books. Not for nothing has George R. R. Martin declared he used it as an inspiration for A Song of Ice and Fire...
  • The Wildesterns from Oisín McGann's Ancient Appetites heartily approve of the use of murder to improve one's standing in the family.
  • Iain Banks likes these, occasionally when writing as Iain M. Banks too. Probably the best example is Prentice McHoan's family in The Crow Road, but The Business, Whit and The Steep Approach to Garbadale also centre around similar families.
  • J. B. Priestley's Benighted, source material for the (better known film adaptation The Old Dark House) features the charming Femm family. Of the group, only Sir Roderick, the oldest, seems sane, but he's also bedridden and effectively trapped upstairs. His brother Horace is on the run for committing some mysterious crime, while his sister Rebecca, who is almost completely deaf, suffers from religious mania. And then there's the murderous Saul, kept locked away — until the drunken servant lets him out.
  • The Breedlove family in The Bluest Eye. The parents are always fighting, the father is an alcoholic who rapes his 12-year-old daughter, and said daughter is Driven to Madness.
  • Born Sick implies this with the subject deciding to break a cycle by not having any children. From what can be guessed at, her family has a recurring trend of being abusive to their kids.
  • Black Vein Prophecy has the family of Benzieval, the warlord and evil sorcerer ruling the Isle of Dawn. The father, Benzieval is a tyrant, the older son Maior opposes his father's rule and is punished by being frozen alive in a mausoleum, and the younger son Feior wants to conquer the Isles to earn his father's trust.
  • The Camp Half-Blood Series: The entire franchise is centered around this on an epic scale. The Olympians in their Greek and Roman aspects are just as dysfunctional as in the myths, they send their descendants in both camps on highly dangerous quests, and two of the Big Bads, Kronos and Gaia, are directly related to the pantheon.
  • Children of the Red King: The Bloors and the Yewbeams (who are related to each other, in fact almost all the characters are at least distantly related, being descendants of the Red King).
  • Agatha Christie used this trope to maximize the pool of suspects in Death Comes as the End, Crooked House, and A Pocket Full of Rye.
  • The royal family from The Chronicles of Amber kind of define this trope. So much backstabbing your brain will give up. Let's just say that if you assume the alliances that develop in the first book are anything but the sheerest tissue of lies and fabrication, you're severely mistaken. Corwin's siblings fall into three categories: those who are in active opposition to him at some point during the series, those who do almost literally nothing throughout the series, and Random (and even he only throws in with Corwin to start with because he thinks Corwin's in a stronger position than he actually is).
  • The Malagash family in The Chronicles of Magravandias. They are constantly plotting the downfall of other family members and shifting allies in their Decadent Court.
  • Most of the families in the novels of Jackie Collins, but especially the Santangelos and the Stanislopouloses.
  • Cradle Series: The Akura Clan is the most powerful family on the continent, led by the Monarch Akura Malice. They epitomize pretty much everything wrong with the world, where the strong demand that the weak kowtow to them, then do the same to anyone stronger than them. Malice's own children must prove their worth at a young age or they never gain the right to call themselves her children, and if they do prove themselves then that just means that they're put through Training from Hell. Through some miracle, this horrible family managed to produce Akura Mercy, the nicest girl in the world who is also the genius of her generation. She was by far the rising star of the family, and looked set to lead it into a kinder future, when personal problems led to her fleeing the family. When she comes back with a few friends, she introduces them to the family casually, not really noticing that the rest of the family is trying to control or destroy these new rivals. According to Akura Charity, most of the better family members have already ascended from the world (to the point that she suspects that there might be more Akura in the heavens than on their homeworld), meaning it's a system that self-selects for the worst people to stay.
  • The Do'Urden family from The Dark Elf Trilogy and pretty much every dark elf family from Menzoberranzan in the Forgotten Realms universe; comes with the territory.
  • Restrepo's Delirium pretty much revolves around this, from Incest Subtext to some brutal Brainwashing throughout Plausible Deniability.
  • The Furstans, the royal family of Torenth in the Deryni series, with a special mention for the Festillic branch of same descended from an incestuous affair.
  • Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Heffleys are definitely not a stable family. Frank's a Jerkass and Bumbling Dad, Susan's absolutely oblivious to how teenagers are nowadays, Rodrick's a step away from dropping out of school, Manny is a spoiled brat who can't seem to stay in school and Greg is a slacker who could very well end up like Rodrick.
  • Dick Francis: Includes this in several novels, with three notable examples.
    • Malcom Pembrooke from Hot Money has had five wives (four of whom he divorced or was planning to while one died), nine children and various grandchildren, many of whom have become dependent on him financially and grow nasty at any perceived threat to their inheritance. One of his sons is an alcoholic with Bastard Angst who emotionally abuses his wife, another is a Hen Pecked Husband on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Yet another son, while pretty well adjusted, has let his mother ruin his first marriage, with his second one being somewhat threatened. His youngest son has brain-damage as the result of a car accident. Malcom's youngest daughter is emotionally stunted and has abandonment issues, while her older half-sister is a Starving Artist whose married to a Gold Digger and has a bad case of Writer's Block. Needless to say, there are plenty of suspects in the murder of his fifth wife and the attempted murder of Malcom.
    • The Strattons in Decider are introduced shortly after the death of the present patriarch and consist of his sister, his three sons (and their wives), their four children, one great-grandchild, and the stepson of his second son. The eldest son was a drug user in his youth (but cleaned up after a friend OD'd), while one of his children is a headstrong Rich Bitch who Does Not Like Men and the other is a Nice Guy but is preoccupied with how he is going bald. The second son is The Resenter due to being a younger twin who only missed being the primary heir by minutes. He's had four wives (two divorced him and one killed herself), and engages in Marital Rape License as well as Parental Incest, making him both the father and grandfather of his daughter's son. The youngest brother is an Upper-Class Twit with a son who almost got arrested for Insurance Fraud. The dead man's sister is an Iron Lady who rules over the rest of the family unapologetically through a mixture of simple deference and blackmail.
    • Reflex Features the Nores. Lavinia Nore, the matriarch of the family (a widow) disowned her daughter Carolina for getting pregnant by Lavinia's new fiancé, and later disowns her son James for being gay, because I Want Grandkids, just not grandkids who share the blood of the man she loved who betrayed her. Caroline has since died of a drug overdose after giving brith to a second child (with a different father) who is being raised by a cult. Dying of cancer, Mrs. Nore ends up hiring her grandson Phillip (a jockey with problems of his own) to find his half-sister near the beginning of the novel.
  • Discworld examples:
    • Nanny Ogg's ginormous family has enough grudges "to keep an entire Ozark of normal hillbillies going for a century". It's noted that the only way the various branches will stop fighting each other is if some outside party insults any family member.
    • Played surprisingly straight by the Lavish family of Making Money. They can't even have dinner together without their Army of Lawyers. At one point, Cosmo attempts to "reassure" an employee he's extorting that he's always thought of the man as family. He thinks about this for a second and adds "but in a good way."
  • The Sunset Lineage in the Dreamblood Duology tends towards this as the Prince is required to have 256 wives, and succession is decided by who can best the others whether by murder or clever schemes. One of Eninket's reasons to take over the world is to change that situation and allow every member of his family to live freely.
  • The Dresden Files: The Raiths, the royal family of the White Court, are a whole bunch of scheming Succubi and Incubi with a Smug Snake at the head. On the other side of the playing field, Harry's family is also pretty screwed-up, with multiple people treading dangerously close to the Black Magic line. Amusingly enough, these two families are actually related through Harry and Thomas's mother, making it one giant screwed-up family.
  • The dynasty at the center of Dune: Paul Atreides' grandfather murdered Paul's father and tried to murder Paul and his mother. Paul's little sister subsequently murdered their grandfather. Paul himself killed his first cousin once removed in a duel. Later on, Paul's sister also had their grandmother killed as well, despite Paul's having ordered her not to. Oh, and Paul's marriage was completely loveless and sexless.
    • And these were the good guys; when you get to the Harkonnens....
  • In Tom Holt's Expecting Someone Taller (a very loose comic sequel to Wagner's The Ring of the Nibelung), the Gods, much as in the opera, are severely dysfunctional. Wotan and the Valkyries, in particular, have a passive-aggressive thing going where he refuses to wipe his feet before entering Valhalla or to clean up after himself, and they bitch about how insensitive and uncaring he is, and everyone's happy.
  • Any family in William Faulkner's novels is, in all likelihood, quite large and quite screwed-up. The Compsons, the Bundrens, the Sutpens... implied incest, murder, cruelty, bad luck, you name it.
  • At the beginning of Flora Segunda, Flora describes how messed up her family is, what with her mother being Married to Her Job as Commanding General of the Califan Army (and being away from home for long stretches of time), while her father is a drunk prone to fits of violence as a result of having spent three years in their world's equivalent of the Hanoi Hilton. Though in the next book, we learn they're practically the Cleavers when compared to the extinct Hadraada family.
  • The Folk of the Air:
    • Jude’s family consists of her identical twin who lets her be bullied and duped in a bid to marry into status, a fae half-sister who does not fully appreciate how much danger her sisters are in, an adoptive fae father who murdered her real parents and still raised her with enough care that she can’t help but acknowledge him as somewhat of a father figure, his second wife who makes no secret of disliking her, and a younger step brother who is secretly royalty and also the biological younger brother of the man Jude’s sister is about to marry.
    • The royal family is a mess of siblings sabotaging one another for the throne, having affairs with their father’s consorts and then murdering the evidence, manipulating their father to try and make him abdicate faster, and beating on or otherwise completely ignoring Cardan because he’s the designated family punching bad. Without getting into any of Cardan’s issues. Bonus points for Cardan’s mom only ever noticing him to laugh when he misbehaves.
  • Jonathan Franzen loves this trope. The Lamberts in The Corrections are a prime example, as are the Hollands in Strong Motion (for a given definition of big).
  • A Frozen Heart: In this Tie-In Novel to Frozen (2013), the Westergaard clan, which rules the Southern Isles with an iron fist, are Royally Screwed Up, and serve as a Foil to the royal family of Arendelle.
  • The Goblin Emperor: The Drazhada, due to Maia's father having married five times. The first wife was set aside for being barren, the second, third, and fourth wives were all dead before thirty, and the fifth wife is young and stupid with pretensions to grandeur. Not to mention all the minor members of the family running around.
  • GONE series:
    • Caine Soren and Diana Ladris both came from big, (rich), messed up families, which could have been foreshadowing for their future relationship. Caine's mother gave him up for adoption and then he was adopted into a family with a stepfather and mother who literally thought he was evil and sent him away to Coates Academy so they wouldn't have to deal with him (he never hears from them again). Diana's situation was arguably even worse, as her father was having an affair, and her parents were getting divorced. That's not even the bad part. Then her mother fell down a flight of stairs and became paralyzed from the neck down, and Diana blamed her dad, who was arrested and imprisoned. It was even lampshaded that Diana was sexually abused by her mother's boyfriends (her mother was apparently, also unfaithful).
    • This becomes Fridge horror/brilliance, when you think about how in PLAGUE and FEAR Caine and Diana form their own estranged big messed-up family when their demon daughter Gaia is born, who tries to kill her father and comes pretty close, too. Also a little messed up as Caine and Diana are only 16/15 years of age when they had her, and that they aren't even together anymore.
    • Most everyone else had abusive parents too: Dekka Talent, Brianna, Orc, Zil... Basically, all families apparently sucked in Perdido Beach.
  • Hannibal Lecter: The "Verger meatpacking dynasty." Mason was a child molester who escaped prison time thanks to the family connections, while dad Molson was a sociopath who killed a child's 4-H pig at a swine fair, had the kid's father beaten for confronting him, and disowned his daughter for being a lesbian.
  • Harry Potter:
    • The Noble and Ancient House of Black. Their house elf servants are traditionally beheaded once they're too old to fetch and carry, and anyone who shows signs of not being a Fantastic Racist is kicked out and has their name blasted off the family tapestry.Including Sirius's brother Regulus was considered The Dutiful Son for joining the Death Eaters, though he eventually got a dose of reality. The expansiveness of the House is such that Harry and Ron each have a Black in their trees (Arthur Weasley's mother was Cedrella Black, who also got blasted off the tree; while Dorea Black, Sirius's great-aunt on his mother's side, married a man named Charlus Potter).
    • The Dumbledores may also count. Percival maims a group of Muggle boys who hurt his daughter Ariana, and goes to Azkaban, Kendra is thought to have imprisoned Ariana for being a Squib though it was common knowledge that she herself was Muggle-born, Ariana was driven insane by the Muggle boys and hidden by her mother and became a host to an Obscurus parasite. Albus started dating Gellert Grindelwald, who later gets into a fight with him and Aberforth, and one of the three winds up killing Ariana. Then Albus and Aberforth get into a fight at Ariana's funeral, and they have a very strained relationship for years. Oh, and then there's the introduction of Credence Barebone, aka Aurelius Dumbledore into canon. He turned out to be the product of Aberforth getting his girlfriend pregnant as a teenager. She was sent away by her family to hide it but rumors persisted about a child. He was believed to have drowned in a shipwreck as a baby and was mistakenly adopted by an American woman who turned him into an Obsurial like Aunt Ariana. Whew.
    • Of course, we should add Tom Marvolo Riddle's (a.k.a. Voldemort's) family. On his mother's side, the Gaunts are descended from notorious pureblood supremacist Salazar Slytherin. The family married their own cousins to preserve the bloodline and squandered their wealth, leaving his grandfather Marvolo in poverty. Marvolo and his son Morfin, Voldemort's uncle, were typical racist purebloods who physically and psychologically abused Marvolo's daughter and Voldemort's mother, Merope. When they both got sent to Azkaban for hexing Muggles, Merope went on to drug a Muggle boy with a love potion in hopes that he would love her for real.
      • The Pottermore tale of the Ilvermorny School sheds light on the Gaunt family's horrible acts back in the seventeenth century. Specifically, Gormlaith Gaunt being a cruel and abusive wicked stepmother to her niece Isolt Sayre, murdering her parents and refusing her to be educated at Hogwarts with the intent of turning her niece into a pure-blood supremacist. Isolt managed to escape to America, marry a Muggle man, adopt a pair of boys and found her own school - this act really pissed Gormlaith off, driving her to travel to America in an attempt to start the cycle again. Thankfully, Isolt's own children, despite being related to the Gaunts, shed the screwed-up traits of their ancestors.

  • How to Sell a Haunted House: Louise's family turns out to be extremely dysfunctional. Her brother Mark resents Louise due to an incident that happened in the book's backstory where the demonic puppet Pupkin that haunts their house nearly tricked her into drowning him. Pupkin himself turns out to be the ghost of Louise and Mark's Uncle Freddie who died decades before the book at the age of five because their mother Nancy accidentally left him to drown when she was seven. Nancy's mother couldn't stand to keep Nancy around after her son had died due to Nancy's negligence, and left her in various ither homes her entire life while swearing people to secrecy. This has led to massive degrees of dysfunction within the family as they try to erase Freddie's memory and put on fake smiles.
  • The Joe Pickett novel In Plain Sight centres around the Scarlett family: one of the oldest and most powerful families in the Twelve Sleeps Valley. The matriarch of the family regards herself as the rightful rule of the whole county and deliberately plays her sons of against one another. When Sheridan has dinner with the family, she suddenly understands the meaning of the term 'Gothic' for the first time.
  • Jeeves and Wooster: The Woosters are a big, hilariously screwed up family. "Family rows" are nasty and complicated, there's more than one instance of diagnosed insanity, a lot of things are kept hushed up, and Evil Matriarch Aunt Agatha frequently resorts to bribery and trickery to stop members of the family from marrying into common blood. According to Bertie, the Woosters can trace their ancestry all the way back to the Crusades.
  • Keep the Aspidistra Flying: The Comstocks, so much. The protagonist Gordon's paternal grandfather, "Gran'pa Comstock", was an iron-fisted patriarch and successful businessman who bullied and traumatised his eleven children so much that all grew up to be dismal failures surviving on his diminishing inheritance. The Comstock brood were all so terrified of their father that only one, that being Gordon's father, John, got married while he was alive, the rest too fearful of his potential retaliation.
  • The Masters of Rome series has nothing but Big Screwed Up Families in it - and since the 'Famous Families' are all interrelated by marriage and adoption you might say the entire ruling class is one supersized example.
  • In the Patrick Melrose novels, the titular character was raped as a child by his father and neglected by his mother (who knew what her husband was doing to their son but did nothing.) leading him to grow up to become a addict of drugs and alcohol, it took him years to beat his addiction and come to terms with his past and move on. Melrose was also the product of rape when his father forced himself on his mother.
  • The Vangers in the Millennium Series are big and they're definitely screwed up. Zalachenko's children, for that matter.
  • The Buendías in Gabriel García Márquez's magnum opus One Hundred Years of Solitude. Many editions of the book come with a family tree — it's nearly impossible to navigate the story without it, especially since the family recycles the same few names every generation.
  • Simona Ahrnstedt gives us the Löwenströms in her debut novel Överenskommelser. They might seem to be an ordinary upper-middle-class family. The sad truth though is that the head of the household is a cruel domestic abuser, who has made his wife ill from unhappiness. He has also abused his own children until his son became a sadistic sociopath and his daughter became a "flawless" extreme doormat. He has now moved on to abuse his niece...
    • Illiana Henriksdotter in "Betvingade" also comes from a screwed-up family, with a tyrannical father and a cold-hearted mother.
    • And the Gripklos of "De skandalösa" also have their issues, with a tyrannical father and a neglectful mother.
  • Pact has an in-depth example in the Thorburn family. Both the protagonist and the readers were shocked at one point late in the story, when a Thorburn actually did something nice for a family member.
    • The other practitioner families aren't much better, either, although they tend to be more loyal to their respective leaders. (The Duchamps, for example, routinely marry off their daughters to...questionable husbands, in order to get magical power).
  • The Monke crime family in The Power. Patriarch Bernie cheated on his wife with another woman, resulting in Roxy, who becomes The Unfavorite on her father's side of the family. When the other woman turns (Roxy's mother) out to be The Informant for a rival gang, he has her killed. When Roxy takes over the family business, Bernie and his son Darrell team up to forcibly transplant her skein to Darrell so Darrell can take charge instead, almost killing Roxy in the process. Nothing like familial love, huh?
  • Reaper (2016): The Founder Players. As Hawk/ Michael points out, while they may be considered legends to everyone else, they are in fact a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits. They're mainly people who couldn't deal with the real world and so chose to live in a video game (like himself), with some who were suffering from illnesses and injuries and at least one sociopath who has to be kept under house arrest.
  • The Reckoning: The Bannings appear at first glance to be just another prominent white family in Jim Crow-era Mississippi, but the patriarch's murder of local Methodist pastor Dexter Bell sets in motion a chain of events leading to the family's downfall in this manner. Even his children, Joel and Stella, are all too happy to leave their family and hometown behind after everything they've learned about the murder.
  • Redwall: The Marlfoxes. The Pure Ferrets of Riftgard in the same series would probably count if there were more than three of them. Verdauga Greeneyes and his two offspring don't count because the only truly screwed-up member was Tsarmina.
  • As it turns out, the de la Rosa family in These Savage Bones is very screwed up. Everyone (except maybe Esperanza herself) has something they're hiding.
  • Most of the Israeli author Meir Shalev's books contain examples of this; examples appear in, among others, Esau, A Russian Novel, and A Pigeon And A Boy.
  • The Preaker/Crellin clan from Sharp Objects. Joya Preaker used to pinch her daughter Adora at night and abandoned Adora in the woods one day when Adora was just a child. Adora grew to be just as bad, if not worse than her mother. She neglects her eldest daughter Camille, poisons her middle daughter Marian to death, and is on her way to doing the same to her youngest daughter Amma. Her husband Alan Crellin turns a blind eye to all of this and defends Adora at every chance. Camille grows into a cutter and The Alcoholic from the trauma of her upbringing, and when she has to take custody of Amma, can't decide if she likes taking care of Amma out of kindness or if she has a tendency towards the Munchausen by Proxy her mother has. Amma herself is a classic case of Strict Parents Make Sneaky Kids and is a serial killer who has murdered three girls with no remorse. Part of the reason no one ever thoroughly looked into the family's history of abuse is because Adora's family is the richest in town, owning a hog farm company that employs a good half of the town.
  • The House of Finwë from The Silmarillion. Finwë, king of the Noldor, remarriednote ; his son by his first wife was very, very bitter: the Big Bad, a Manipulative Bastard, stirred things up: numerous feuds ensued. Brother tried to kill brother, brother forgave brother, brother did it again; cousin saved cousin, cousin tried to kill cousin, there was a bit of incest, etc. Finarfin is completely aware of how messed up his family is, and tries to distance himself from them. The House of Fingolfin (Finwë's second son), are more decent save for Maeglin, who desires his cousin and attempts to murder her son. Galadriel, Elrond, and his children are the last (mostly elven) members of that family in Middle-Earth in the Third Age, by the way, but by this time the craziness has mostly run out. Aragorn is also technically of the House of Finwë since his umpty-great grandfather was Elrond's brother, but there are a lot more generations in between him and the crazy.
    • The crazy is mainly in Finwë's eldest son Curufinwë/Fëanor and his descendants; Galadriel and Elrond are descended from Fëanor's half-brothers, who were generally the more responsible/reasonable parties in the tried to kill/forgave/tried to kill again pairings mentioned. Only two of Fëanor's sons aren't killed, and even they don't get happy endings.
  • Several noble families in A Song of Ice and Fire fit the bill, Decadent Court oblige.
    • Our main protagonist, the Stark family, seems immune at the start of the series which doesn't save them at all. On the other hand, though they have currently been displaced from their lands, they look more likely to win in the long term than many of the more villainous families. However, even they don't have it perfect, as Catelyn notoriously treats Jon like dirt despite her husband and children loving him (though this isn't entirely her fault, on account of Ned's refusal to disclose his parentage and the traditional treatment of bastards in Westeros).
    • On the other hand, Catelyn's birth family, the Tullys, fit the bill. Her father and uncle had a falling out years before the start of the series, because the latter rejected a marriage offer from another house. Cat and her sister, Lysa, were locked in a Sibling Triangle with Petyr Baelish, a lowborn. When the latter was impregnated by him, their father secretly served her a poison so she would miscarry, which is implied to be the reason why she continuously miscarried and eventually gave birth to a sickly child. By the time the series starts, Lysa is still estranged from her father, refusing to aid him during the conflict against the Lannisters or even reply his letter as lies dying. And then Lysa is revealed to be one of the masterminds of the war in the first place, betraying her sister whom she grew to hate in the interim...
    • The current Lannisters are pretty much a textbook example. (there's a reason they're the page image) Not only are they wealthy, powerful and ambitious, but scheming and snarking seem to run in the family. Not to mention incest, father-son conflicts and horrendous parenting. They also scheme against each other almost as much as they do to other people. Even the extended Lannister family has problems thanks to old hatreds, envy, insecurity and ambition.
    • The Targaryens are not very far behind, similarly incestuous, and Royally Screwed Up to boot. Especially prevalent during the Dance of the Dragons, with the branches from Viserys I's two marriages scheming against each other, while Viserys' ambitious and dangerous brother Daemon plotted to gain more power, even marrying his niece Rhaenyra to assist him. The only difference from the Lannisters is that we don't get to see much of it in detail, because by the start of the main series, misfortune and stupidity had pretty much reduced the Targaryens to a pair of siblings. Then one of them bites the dust midway through the first book. While she definitely did not grow up happy, at least Daenerys can discount family from things she has to deal with, for now.
    • The Freys are the biggest of the screwed-up families present. Their current patriarch has fathered 22 legitimate sons and 7 legitimate daughters (officially), to say nothing of his many bastards (plus grandchildren, great-grandchildren, grandbastards, etc.), and if only half of what is said of the machinations of his progeny is true (particularly those surrounding Black Walder, who may have fathered some of his great-grandfather's younger official children), they have already begun clandestinely, and even murderously, manoeuvring against one another... in addition to the usual constant complex political plots to curry favor up and down the various chains of command. They basically need only the death of the head of the family (currently over 90) to erupt into open, bloody struggling. It even goes down to the youngest members of the family, with one of Walder Frey's grandsons, "Big" Walder, probably having secretly murdering another grandson, "Little" Walder, while they are both nine. Yet the lad somehow still comes across as a Token Good Teammate for the possible putting down a future uncontrollable monster along the lines of Ramsay Bolton.
    • Craster's family. It doesn't exactly fit the description (though they are relatively well-set for wildlings), but "big and screwed up" doesn't begin to describe it: Craster has nineteen wives, most of whom are his daughters and it's understood that his granddaughters of the right age are/would also be his wives. He rules the family with an iron fist, makes the women do all the work and forbids them to speak to strangers as well as the strangers speaking to them. Oh, and the skeleton in his cupboard? His wives sometimes bear him sons, which he then sacrifices to the Others.
    • The Greyjoys. Considering they're the ruling family of a culture that considers Rape, Pillage, and Burn a good thing, it's no surprise they are screwed up. Theon Greyjoy was relatively well-adjusted living with the Starks as a "ward"note , but his reunion with his birth family and the conflict between their values and Stark values screwed him up fast. However even by Ironborn standards Theon's uncle Euron Greyjoy is considered particularly bad, not only murdering three of his brothers but raping two of them.
    • Marrying into the Boltons? Might we cordially suggest diving into chummed waters around the Summer Isles without a cage, rather? You'd have better luck with the sharks — what with the greater than 66.67% chance you'll just end up wishing to die quickly to get it over with. And, this is not hyperbole: count the number of dead or really, really messed-up wives — with just two husbands involved... Of four that we know much about, two are dead (one very horribly; the other a little mysteriously of a fever — whatever that means), one so badly abused and on the run, your heart goes out to her... and the other is so far fine. So far. It's doubtful much of the fanbase is holding their breaths on this staying the case, however (if Roose doesn't try to kill her, Ramsay is likely to). Oh: and, there is a fifth. But, we don't even know what her name was or what happened. Just that she's not around. And, if the rumours that have surrounded House Bolton for centuries are even remotely true... this is not new. And, puts the relatively small number of Boltons into a very interesting light, considering their mileage on wives — and temporary others.
  • The Amazing Telemachus Family from Spoonbenders were a household name back in The '60s, showing off their Psychic Powers to the public. That is until they were humiliated on live-television by a well-known skeptic. Now they're living "normal" lives on Dysfunction Junction; their matriarch Maureen dies of uterine cancer, their patriarch Teddy using his abilities to con drunks out of pocket change and pick-up lonely single-moms, Frankie taking up Get-Rich-Quick Schemes with Mob Debt, Irene is a single mother to Matty who is forced to move back in with the rest of the family when she loses her job, and Buddy is somewhere on the spectrum and has to be looked after.
  • The Stormlight Archive: The Davar clan consists of the father who is slowly going murderously insane, the eldest son who abandons the family for years to make dangerous deals to get revenge on said father for a perceived crime, the second son who tortures animals in his spare time, the third son who does nothing but stare at the wall all day, the fourth son who drinks and gambles his money and prestige away, and Shallan. Shallan seems like the most well-adjusted despite being a Shrinking Violet, but she is probably the most messed-up of them all. And since everything started when Shallan killed her mother as a child (her mother was trying to kill her at the time) and her father took the blame, she has good reason to believe that everything wrong with her family is her fault.
  • The Sunne in Splendour is about The Wars of the Roses, which was known in its time as the cousins war. Of particular focus is the York branch of the Plantagenet family, which includes adultery, light treason, heavy treason, bigamy, malicious slander and one judicial murder. There's also plenty of bastard children running around, and Kissing Cousins aplenty.
  • Any family the heroine is a member of in any V. C. Andrews novel is screwed up by default.
    • The Foxworths in the Dollanganger Series. Generations of incest, parental abandonment, and abuse (emotional, physical, and psychological) are only made worse by the fact that these people are richer than God and can do whatever they want.
  • Warrior Cats:
    • Every Clan is so inbred at this point that every Clan-born character is related to everyone else. It isn't uncommon for someone to have an affair with their cousin or even sibling. One character even went out with her half-uncle for a while.
    • At best, they're suspicious of each other, at worst, they're constantly trying to kill each other... yeah.
    • Subverted with inter-Clan mating, and the (very) rare newcomer.
  • The so-called 'beautiful' Sinclair family of We Were Liars by e. lockhart. Throughout the novel it's clear that something's being hidden even aside from the exhausting inheritance disputes, messy divorces, and controversial relationships, and towards the end it's revealed that three of the teenage family members (and several dogs) were killed in an arson attack initiated by the protagonist herself.
  • Whateley Universe:
    • Sara Waite has one fucked up family. Let's see... Her daddy is Gothmog, Demon Lord of Lust and Perversion; her mother mutated into a freakish Deep One thing that drives Sara (then known as Michael) insane when (the then) he killed her; the Necromancer is her uncle; her blood-sister is the ultimate elvish Faerie Queen; her family tree includes several Great Old Ones; Tennyo, if actually part of the Mythos, is possibly a relative, and therefore Sociopathic Hero and Hello Kitty fan, Jade, would be too (adopted); Sara herself is an omnisexual, tentacle-raping, part-demon, part-were, part-fey, part-Deep One, part-Great Old One, part-human who is supposed to destroy the world, but decided to Screw Destiny.
    • The Wilkins family have been described as a pack of self-aggrandizing weasels with a collective case of Chronic Backstabbing Disorder. They are all highly competent in their individual criminal fields (though some of their specializations are very narrow, e.g., custom lair construction; tailored supersuits for villains; themed super-vehicle customization; etc.), and would be a force to reckon with if they could stop their in-fighting for more than a few minutes at a time, but they never do.
    • Eisenmadel's family is almost as big a mess as Carmilla's. Her great-grandfather was the Nazi Theme Agent The Green Knight. While her grandmother, the original Eisenmadel, rejected her father's beliefs and became an anti-Fascist superheroine. Then her mother join with the branch of the family which clung to The Fourth Reich's attempts to subvert the US government, with Erica herself joining her grandparents in opposing them.
  • A lot of the minor characters in White as Snow are King Draco's bastard children and issues arise for his legitimate daughter from how well he treated them.
  • Wolf Hall:
    • The Boleyns. They pimp out their elder daughter Mary to King Francis and then Henry VIII to raise their standing, then insult and disregard her whenever she doesn't have a powerful paramour (she eventually elopes with a poor knight and doesn't look back). Anne takes a lesson to be flirtatious but not actually promiscuous and routinely mocks Mary for having been such a fool. Their brother George is in a loveless marriage and his wife Jane despises him and Anne so much she's happy to see them both dead. Their father Thomas is concerned only with his advancement and position; when Anne loses Henry's favor he doesn't lift a finger to help and his main concern is whether or not he gets to keep his titles. Her uncle Norfolk and cousin Francis Bryan, meanwhile, actively assist Cromwell in bringing her down, and Norfolk presides over the court that sentences her to death.
    • The Seymours don't flaunt their horrific behavior towards each other in quite such a public manner, but they're not much for family values either. The tale that reaches court is how Old John Seymour slept with his son Edward's wife—not just once, but weekly, and long enough that Edward doesn't know if her kids are his sons or his half-brothers. Edward and brother Tom both discuss their sister Jane Seymour as a commodity to be traded; while she affects a meek air, some of her comments make it clear that she's got some Opinions on them both. Really, she and her sister Bess are the only people in the family who are basically reasonable.
  • Priam's family from The Troy Saga fits this. Priam and Hekabe constantly belittle just about all their sons, who aren't Hektor, accomplishments and inflicted many cruel and traumatizing lessons on them as a kid. By the start of the series, Priam has had five of his sons executed throughout his reign who tried to overthrow him. As well as also viewing just about all their daughters as valuable in so far as they can bridges for political arranged marriages and neglect the ones who are decided not be beautiful enough to wed to anyone of importance.
  • The Butterfields from Endless Love, a true Bourgeois Bohemian clan of The '60s, with an alternative medicine practicing father, a writer mother and three emotionally maladjusted kids. They invite their teen daughter Jade's boyfriend David to live with them, the mother spies on the two while they have sex, and in one key scene the entire family takes LSD together. Jade even calls them "my fucked-up family."

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