Humpty Dumpty

by Harold Rogers

A high school quarterback and his family are embroiled in an abhorrent crime and its cover-up—a bold new novel that confronts American hero-worship and its irreversible consequences.

HUMPTY-DUMPTY SAT ON A WALL . . .
Darius Rodgers is the king of Steubenville, Ohio. Invincible, a god among men. He’s the quarterback about to lead his team to their first State Championship in twenty years. And now his mom and his twin sister, Beatriz and Anna, are back from exile in Rio, trying to sew the estranged family back together. Nothing can spoil his Not love. Not loyalty. Nothing. Until he ushers in his own doom.

HUMPTY-DUMPTY HAD A GREAT FALL . . .
Anna doesn’t even want to be back in Stupidville, but she decides to make the most of it. She’s here to live free and have fun! But her secret romance with Darius’s best friend, Fleet, and the rumors it spawns make the first domino fall in a series of social detonations of one small town's moral crime, conspiracy, silence, betrayal, hackers, incels, dereliction!

How the hell do you tell a story like this?

Hilarious, bold, and explosively original, Harold Rogers's Humpty Dumpty is a reckoning with American rot, generational failure, and the brutal question at the heart of every Why didn’t you do anything?

Genres: Fiction

448 pages, Hardcover

Expected publication November 10, 2026

Reviews

[Letitia | Bookshelfbyla · Rating 5 out of 5]

ABSOLUTE CINEMA !!!

A whirlwind rollercoaster ride following the cast of a small town in Ohio as the Rogers family finally reunite as mother/ daughter spent the past 4 years in Brazil.

As estranged twins, Darius & Anna, embark on their senior year, we learn each member of the family has targets on their backs unbeknownst to them. Meanwhile, tension and hopes are high as the towns pride and joy, the football team, are on the road to be state champs - hopefully bringing redemption & glory to the town.

But once a crime gets committed involving the star football players, all the buried resentment, hatred, jealousy, corruption, & depravity that was boiling under the surface completely implodes the town 🔥🥲

The depraved and dark humor of ITS ALWAYS SUNNY IN PHILADEPHIA, with the morally corrupt & vengeful behavior of the men in REJECTION with a cast of characters and dynamics from EUPHORIA and the stellar storytelling reminiscent of THE SLIP & THE BEE STING with Harold’s singular voice, vocabulary and creativity etc.

HUMPTY DUMPTY will make you laugh, cringe, scoff, scream at all the ways people let revenge, pettiness, spitefulness and desire for power & admiration ruin themselves and harm others, how corrupt authorities are, how cycles repeat and how karma and luck dish out in unique ways.

Hilarious without being didactic, balancing the dark with the light and providing a snapshot at a town that reflects the darkest and shameful parts of twenty-first century life.

Thank you FSG for the #gifted copy in exchange for my honest review. This is one of my most anticipated reads since I saw the announcement and I absolutely loved it. Will be handselling it to everyone I know (who has a sense of humor) LITERATURE IS SO BACK!!!

[Jack Houghteling · Rating 5 out of 5]

All the big things, yes: it intros Harold as one of the best comic writers in the culture & language (two languages!) along those contrails of Borges, Twain, Sterne & Fitzgerald; it asks, better than any book that I can remember, if all the endless movement (journey’s birth, journey’s death) is love or dust; it asks wtf we’re supposed to do with the two and three selves of this century when we never got around to dealing with the first one (!!); it knows (and knowing is enough, but so well too) that the animal is both your grace and ne’er-solved nightmare.

But really (the majesty’s math) it is the music itself - the music the music the music the music - of which the following notes will hang on my conifer (mangueira) forever:

Ezaleel
John’s waffling between devil and angel
And what am I good at?
Mayor jimmy
Dragon.
Warren g Harding story
Red cup piss job
The whole of page 72
“He reminds me of your fucking brother”
“Where the guns?”
“All of us become failures in different ways doesn’t mean you can’t be happy”
Agenbite of inwit
Step uncle geoff
Important but ordinary roles
“Your poems are terrible”
Picture of Dallas JFK at bar (why?!!!?)
Picture of young Darius
“When did you become such an asshole”//“I can still kick your ass”
Uncle Fuckhead stealing money as bank teller
“U r cute//u r hot//u r sexy” (“he was just another man”)
Like a river, trying to erode (:()
My virginity depended on it!
You just picked up right where I left off
Columbus’s bones
“Are you talking to my fucking wife buddy?”
The whole of page 297
Interlocking system of crab barrels
40 FUCKING YEARS
8 to 20
Lenny’s we gotta go for 2
Should’ve gotten everything right
Strict when lenient and lenient when strict
Harry’s response to Darius following him into bathroom
“Shut the fuck up Lenny!”
“No that’s not what I think is going on”
Jack and Tristram
She’d imagined this scenario a million times
But I wanted a big life
John Deere trucker
Hero mom
Ines’ husband
Cathy (A clarity of judgment bereft of solipsism and condemnation)
Lashawna’s speech
I’m sorry

[Samuel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Straight hoopin

[Erin · Rating 5 out of 5]

ARC for review. To be published November 10, 4.5 stars

I so enjoyed this quirky book that plays with language, has multiple points of view (and so offers many “main characters”) and often breaks the fourth wall while engaging me fully. It’s set in Steubenville, OH, a real town set solidly in the OH/PA/WV triangle. I live adjacent to this area and have spent much time there and the town absolutely comes alive in Rogers’ writing - a reader comes to know it and its people keenly, they are mostly the working lower middle class or poor, often troubled, trapped or both.

The story is centered around teenagers Darius and Anna Rodgers (note the similarity between this surname and the author’s even though I’m not sure what to make of it.). The twins are seniors and Darius is the high school’s quarterback in a football-mad town (the part of Ohio is known for their outstanding football teams and their towns’ devotion to them.

Darius is an outstanding player, already committed to Ohio Stare and he’s the toast of town, to say nothing of his Catholic high school. And the populace has pinned their hopes on him and his best friend and favorite receiver Fleet, a young Black man. Steubenville is desperate for another state championship and Darius and Fleet can get them there.

Anna has just returned to town from four years spent with her mother in her hometown country of Brazil. Anna and Beatriz fled there after her husband, the twins’ father had a one nightstand. However Beatriz has decided to give her marriage another try.

Anna’s entrance into high school life is quick and successful, she reconnects with former friend Maya, Fleet’s girlfriend and Anna becomes part of her popular crowd. However, Anna and Fleet share an instant connection and, like teenagers will l, they act on it, keeping that from both Darius and Maya.

The book isn’t all high school high jinks though and Steubenville is filled with adult drama too - old scores to be settled, reappearances, conspiracies and crime abound.

One night, at a high school party many of the kids get intoxicated and a life-altering event occurs. It will resonate through the town and ultimately leads to untold amounts of difficulty and sorrow for its residents.

The book likely isn’t for everyone. It has a distinct devil1may-care style that some may dislike; especially given the subject matter , but I thought it was a striking reflection of the futility, the absurdity of the lives of those in Steubenville.

There aren’t a lot of happy endings (but there are a few that aren’t unhappy) and that is keeping with what many Americans can expect today, especially in hardscrabble towns where, often, a successful football season is all one can reasonably hope for.

[Ryan Pike · Rating 5 out of 5]

TL;DR: HUMPTY DUMPTY is eggscellent!

The teenage characters and Euphoria-esque social dynamics will resonate with anyone who grew up in the 2010’s, but the interconnected family drama and preponderance of seedy small-town politics are what really give HUMPTY DUMPTY its heart. The mythic structure at play — Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall — can be seen across practically every character in Steubenville, most ominously with Darius Rodgers, the Quarterback lording over it all.

Beyond all that, HUMPTY DUMPTY is a damn fun read. Rogers writes clearly across a cacophony of voices at a breakneck pace that recalls and surpasses the strongest moments from his debut, TROPICALIA. As with that novel, HUMPTY DUMPTY pays off the promise of its salacious premise and forces readers to reckon with humanity's sordid underbelly.

But HUMPTY DUMPTY isn’t just some hard-boiled caper. The novel is absurd and hilarious. At one point, I laughed so hard that my wife got mad at me, and then I annoyed her even further with my vain attempts to wax philosophical on matters of confession and forgiveness, family and faith, and of course, how freakin sick it would be to have a giant nutcracker effigy made for me if I was the star Quarterback / God of a little town in the Ohio River Valley … Crack open HUMPTY DUMPTY to enjoy all of this and more.

[Megan Magee · Rating 4 out of 5]

When a horrible crime happens to a beautiful small town girl, the popular football town as a whole strives to cover it up. Darius Rodgers is the quarterback of Steubenville- untouchable, on par with God, not to be buggered with. His sister, Anna, and mother, Beatriz, are also POV's we follow. This one is so quirky and fun, taking is through generational ruin and what the biblical "Curses" look like, indeed. The brainrot trend is woven into this, too, making it so timely and hard to forget in modern litfic. The characters and age groups are split here, but the author clearly has one goal in making all these players work together to make this novel as entertaining and zany as possible. Thank you to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for the eARC. All opinions are entirely my own.

[Renee Gearhart levy · Rating 4 out of 5]

The synopsis of this book describes it as a story about high school students and a crime cover-up. Really, it's a story about family and relationships, but man is it crazy. I can't remember the last book I read with this strong a sense of voice. The book is written in the first person and told from the perspective of multiple characters, which keeps it interesting, but since the sections aren't labeled by character, it is not always clear initially who you are hearing from. I thought the book was original and non formulaic and found it very entertaining. Thank you to Netgalley for the ARC.

[Chelsea · Rating 5 out of 5]

in which a bizarre cast of generationally traumatized yokels are doomed to repeat the sins of their forebears… narrated by a yinzer charles portis. zany, hilarious, challenging, and surprisingly profound, rogers’s cast of crooked characters reads like something out of a cohen brothers film. massive fun but makes u think 🤔🤔🤔

[Nick · Rating 5 out of 5]

that was wild

[Max Simon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lost Lambs for Boys

[HAROLD · Rating 5 out of 5]

"A MULTIMODAL ANALYSIS OF ORIGIN."

— ETHAN MAGUIRE (FRIEND OF THE AUTHOR)

[Venneh · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked this postmodern take on small town football team drama and all the people who get caught up in. The POV gets thrown around the various members of a small fractured family, and in interludes, the towns people as well. I like Rogers' stylistic choices, and how he traces the outcomes of actions across each of our focal characters. The way he chooses to sabotage the ending is a real neat touch too. Comes out in November, and worth your time when it does.