A Sickness in the Family is a creepy little tale about the complexity of familial and financial relationships centred on the disintegration of the Usher family. Parents Ted and Biddy, their grown children William, Amy and Sam, and Grandmother Martha live together in a maisonette on Glasgow’s Eton Terrace. After an inevitable tragedy befalls their downstairs neighbours, a violent thug and his Polish girlfriend, the Usher family buy the apartment with a view to extending their own home down a level. To this end, Ted commissions a bespoke staircase and then allows the builders to rip a massive hole in the floor of the house in preparation for the arrival of said staircase.

While this building work creates a physical hole in the Usher’s family life, there are more serious matters afoot which threaten their collective emotional stability. Ted and Biddy are having marriage counselling and constantly sniping at each other, William has been sent down from university and will not explain why, Amy resents her father’s decision to sell the family business and feels that her expertise are being overlooked, Sam has unresolved angst stemming from his adoption into the family, while Granny Martha is becoming an increasingly decrepit burden on everyone. And then, one by one, the family begin to die grisly, inexplicable deaths.

Denise Mina’s first original graphic novel [she has previously had a run on Hellblazer], A Sickness in the Family is published through Vertigo’s Crime imprint and is a neat little mystery story. There is a decent build-up before the main storyline is unleashed where the principle characters are reasonably well developed and their motivations are established so that, although they never do become a likeable bunch, the reader does begin to care about the family and so wonder about the circumstances of their various deaths. Although the behaviour of some of the characters is rather extreme, particularly Biddy’s middle-class desperation and Amy’s money-hungry feelings of alienation, Mina does just manage to keep the family on the right side of believable. Less successful is the rather half-hearted attempt made at suggesting that some sort of supernatural force might be behind the deaths that plague the family. Suddenly convinced that their house is exerting a malevolent force over the family, Sam investigates the history of the place and Googles up some vague link to centuries past witchcraft. This sub-plot isn’t really developed further and, since the mystery element of A Sickness in the Family is pretty tight and convincing, could probably have been dispensed with altogether.

A Sickness in the Family is illustrated by Antonio Fuso entirely in sparse black and white which is in keeping with the general noir aesthetic of the book. Fuso has produced clear and effective character visuals, making particularly good use of shadow, although some of his backgrounds do verge on generic and nondescript. Since the environment and atmosphere of the house itself plays such a central role in the plot it would have been nice to have a bit more detail. Similarly, a greater use could perhaps have been made of famous Glasgow landmarks and the particular style of the city. All in all though, he has captured well the gritty criminality at the centre of Mina’s story.

While A Sickness in the Family might be a slight book, the storyline is certainly punching above its weight class and the fall of this particular House of Usher will linger in the mind of readers long after the story is finished.

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