What if Edgar Allan Poe had written “Succession”?

It’s not a question I’d have thought to ask, but Mike Flanagan – the creator of “The Haunting of Hill House,” “The Haunting of Bly Manor” and “Midnight Mass” – takes it up with grisly flair. “The Fall of the House of Usher,” his Netflix miniseries about a monstrously wealthy family getting their comeuppance, comes together via a playfully horrifying mash-up of Poe stories, poems and characters. As someone who loved many of the writer’s stories (and the illustrations!) as a kid, the best thing I can say about this series is that it evokes a similar feeling of schadenfreude tempered by melancholy, horror, morbid fascination and regret.

Flanagan co-wrote and directed most of the episodes, which incorporate the gothic pleasures of Poe favorites such as “The Pit and the Pendulum” and “The Masque of the Red Death” into a contemporary drama about a nefarious but charismatic billionaire who makes his feckless children compete, sometimes brutally, for his favor. The miniseries is markedly uninterested in that competition or the psychodynamics thereof. It lingers, instead – like a gruesome “Christmas Story” – on how things got to this point, and on the price the billionaire (and his no less complicit sister) must pay.

The patriarch is Roderick Usher (Bruce Greenwood), the aging head of a pharmaceutical company called Fortunato that specializes in an addictive drug called Ligadone. He runs the company with his twin sister, Madeline (Mary McDonnell), a ruthless pragmatist whose loyalty to her brother is exceeded only by her commitment to the success of their project. They are shielded from any legal consequences by their “fixer,” Arthur Pym, played by a formidably inexpressive Mark Hamill.

Madeline is childless. The Usher “dynasty” therefore depends on Roderick’s children. These include his eldest, Frederick (Henry Thomas), a Kendall Roy type and father to the only Usher grandchild, unluckily named Lenore. There’s Tamerlane (Samantha Sloyan), an ambitious but fragile redhead who desperately needs and depends on the goofy husband whom she insists is beneath her. Victorine (T’Nia Miller) works on cutting-edge medical technology and cuts corners in clinical trials. Rounding out the gang are Camille (Kate Siegel), a savagely capable public relations professional, Leo (Rahul Kohli), a pansexual gamer and Prospero (Sauriyan Sapkota), a party boy hoping to turn his love of clubbing into leverage he can use to blackmail the rich and powerful.

In Flanagan’s version of “Succession,” the kids all die.

That’s not a spoiler. The miniseries opens with a preacher reciting a Poe mishmash (including lines from “For Annie” and “Spirits of the Dead”) over three coffins belonging to the first set of deceased Ushers.

The question is why they all died, and the show’s framing conceit is Roderick’s convoluted, not-entirely-reliable account of his life. Reeling from the deaths of his children and weak from an untreatable disease, the billionaire lures his longtime nemesis C. Auguste Dupin (Carl Lumbly), who has spent decades trying to bring the Ushers to justice, to his crumbling childhood home – with the promise of a full confession.

Greenwood (who replaced Frank Langella as Roderick when the latter was fired from the production for “inappropriate conduct”) threads a tricky needle here. His Roderick – who in other circumstances is ruthless, strategic, vengeful – seems shrewd but suspiciously undefended in these scenes with Dupin in ways that might worry fans of (for example) “The Cask of Amontillado.” Greenwood’s affect makes it tricky to tell whether Roderick is hallucinating or playing mind games when he tells a perplexed Dupin, who maintains that the Usher deaths were accidental, that he is guilty of all the corporate malfeasance Dupin suspects him of and killing his children, too. It feels like a chess match, with Lumbly’s Dupin remaining gratifyingly skeptical throughout Roderick’s story.

The basic setup here is borrowed from the Poe short story of the same name, in which an ailing man invites a friend to his dilapidated childhood home. But the twins from Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher,” Roderick and Madeline, are redrawn here as co-conspirators whose childhood trauma (as revealed in campy but disturbing flashbacks in the first episode) spurs them to build an empire on the annihilation of human pain.

Each of the middle six episodes describes the gruesome death of an Usher child. Each is haunted by a mysterious woman (Carla Gugino) who tempts the Usher in question to disaster. These amount to winky morality tales – fables, almost, riffing on Poe stories like “Goldbug” and “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Individually, they’re engrossing and weird and absorbing. The effect of the whole, however, is blurry. The miniseries intends the deaths of Roderick’s children to form part of his moral education, but the patriarch is portrayed (correctly, I think) as a little too self-involved to care much about the agonies his children suffer – or about his dynasty.

Put differently: There’s a scattershot quality to the justice Flanagan dispenses here, and the most shocking moment accordingly comes not when an Usher suffers, but when a non-Usher is literally and graphically tortured.

This isn’t a subtle show. It isn’t particularly deep. It is, however, a morbidly entertaining ride that winks at least as much as it instructs (the series opens to the strains of Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall”). Poe-heads are likely to enjoy it, as will “Succession” fans who wanted the Roys to face something a little more concrete than “poetic justice.” The series is, in this specific sense, optimistic – a fantasy that accountability is coming (even if from another realm), that the bill will come due for wealthy malefactors. Repentance will be extracted. Consequences exist.

I’ve made much of the parallels to the Roys in “Succession,” but the more obvious reference point is the Sacklers, who received full immunity for all civil legal claims back in May, and upon whose opiate empire Fortunato is clearly based. That immunity may yet be stripped, but absent legal remedies, there’s at least a little catharsis in Flanagan’s resolution to visit graphic, imaginative and proportionate pain on characters who destroyed countless lives by hawking painlessness.

The Fall of the House of Usher, episodes 1-8, is available to stream on Netflix.

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