Greg Perkins' 19-volume Darkness Before Mourning is one of the largest series of serious fiction ever created by a single author. Over 40 years in the making, the novels comprise over 10,000 pages in manuscript. Publishing the project has required an enormous editorial team to ensure that the complete series will be issued in only 2 years, starting with Volume I, The Announcers. Each independent work forms part of a biographical continuum, exploring in profoundly dark semi-fictionalized form the author's searing experiences. This, the first volume of the series, will be published in July, 2015, with the rest of the works following over the following 24 months. Perkins' absolutist realism, unredeemed by faith, is best compared to Thomas Bernhard, Albert Camus, or Samuel Beckett. The series is a remarkable window into American society, life, family and personal relationships from the 1950s to the present. In The Announcers, a man relives one of the pivotal periods that shaped his life: the two seasons he spent in Little League with his father, the team's announcer, who was secretly dying of cancer.