There was always that family. Call them a “cursed” clan, in which every generation inherited its parents’ easy rapport with sin and retribution. From truancy and shoplifting to bootlegging and burglary, they might have chalked it up to bad luck and blamed their nosy neighbors for their bum reputation. Or they might, like the subject of Fox Butterfield’s latest familial deep dive, take perverse pride in their criminal lot, every son wanting to be just as bad as his brother.

Part of the pleasure of the unseemly story Butterfield unspools is its universality. The existence—in seemingly every predominantly white American hamlet of the upper south, at least—of a family whose sons were always in and out of prison and daughters always between bad marriages (if they weren’t full criminals, too) feels about as reliable a fixture as the county sheriff. The Bogles, Butterfield’s subject here, will ring familiar even if you’ve never personally known anyone like them.