Sunday, July 29, 2018

The NARC Series



It all began with DEATH'S HEAD, originally published in 1991, in abridged form by GMP in the UK. A year later came EQUINOX, the second of the Jarrat and Stone books ... and then a ten-year lull while GMP, as a business, wound down and merged itself into the much larger Millivres-Prowler Group.

Many readers still don't relize that DEATH'S HEAD was heavily abridged in the GMP version. If you're reading the old GMP paperback, you're 25,000 words short of getting the whole picture ... you definitely need to be reading the UNabridged version!

Not until Mel Keegan entered into the long-term creative partnership with DreamCraft Multimedia did the NARC books stir back to life, and they took off in 2004/05 the way they should have fifteen long years ago.

The third novel, SCORPIO, was published in September 2004, and Mel has dusted off old notebooks: the story outlines for NARC books which were planned and of necessity shelved, so long ago.

Next came STOPOVER, which we whimsically called 'NARC #3.5," since it's a slim volume which falls between SCORPIO and APHELION. It's the same length as most of the SF novels of the 1960s — about 44,000 words ... and MK had actually intended it to be the prolog to APHELION.

Halfway through the writing, we all realized Keegan had 'done it again,' and the novel was going to run way too long. We cut STOPOVER out of APHELION and released it as a stand-alone early in 2007, while APHELION followed along later.

Then, alas, came a long, long drought. With Mel's health failing and Jade retiring, between 2007 and 2018, NARC went onto old ... but it nagged away in the back of Mel's mind, that the series wasn't finished, and needed to be finished.

A respite from health difficulties in 2017/2018 brought Mel back to the keyboard with a will. SCIMITAR, BASILISK and ENDGAME were written "back to back," coming in at just a whisker under 400,000 words. Yes, you read that right. In mid-2018 they're being released under one cover as THE ENDGAME OMNIBUS, in ebook format for Kindle, Nook, PC, Mac, whatever: Mobi, PDF and EPUB. (Sadly, it's physically impossible for a print on demand publisher to produce a 900pp paperback, so the three books are being issued in three volumes in August or September 2018.)












Like to know more about the NARC Series? You'll need to be viewing a larger screen for the "rich content" page, which isn't so "mobile friendly," but when you're on your desktop -- click here to visit NARC Central!

This mobile friendly version of MEL KEEGAN ONLINE created and posted by webmaster JADE.

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