Interview with Harold Covington, Part 3

Read Part 1 here.
Read Part 2 here.

TOQ: I really enjoy your novels. I have reviewed the Northwest Quartet, and I have also read Slow Coming Dark, Fire And Rain, and most recently The Stars In Their Path, as well as the collection Other Voices, Darker Rooms. Who are your main literary influences? Which of your works are your favorites and why?

Harold Covington: My father was a reader of pulp science fiction back in the 1950s and 1960s, and he had these big cardboard cartons of old sci-fi paperbacks in the basement, including a lot of the old Ace doubles that went for 50 cents in those days and would probably go for a couple of hundred bucks apiece today if you could get hold of an intact copy. They were written by all the sci-fi greats of the 50s and 60s: Robert A. Heinlein, Brian Aldiss, Philip K. Dick, Alfred Bester, Edmond Hamilton, Alan E. Nourse, Andre Norton, Ray Bradbury, etc. Those were my first bulk reading, and then starting about age 14 I somehow (don’t remember how) discovered H. P. Lovecraft, and that was love at first sight. I still lug around three-volume Arkham House set of his complete works with me wherever I go.

My Northwest novels are purely political polemics, wherein I say things that wouldn’t be politic to say openly in any other context. They are for the purpose of imparting ideas and disseminating practical information using what Lenin called “Aesopian Language,” the language of fable. My actual fiction as such, novels like The Stars In Their Path, The Renegade, Vindictus, etc. aren’t really “influenced” by anyone or anything. They’re just stories I get into my febrile brain and which I have to purge by telling them and letting them out.

As to my favorites, excluding the Quartet, which don’t count because they’re not really novels in the true sense of the word, I’d have to say that The Madman and Marina [in Other Voices, Darker Rooms] is the best short piece I’ve ever done. It may possibly even be the best piece, period—I once had an e-mail correspondent in St. Petersburg tell me he didn’t believe that my name is Covington, that I had to be a Russian writing under an American pseudonym, because only a Russian could produce such a Dostoyevskyan story. I consider that to be the best review I’ve ever had.

Personal favorite among the long novels? The Stars In Their Path, I’d say. Like all my other books it tells a story, but I use reincarnation as a device to keep on telling the same story over and over and over again, a different way each time and with different characters, rather than draw the same plot out to 100,000 words of padding. I think that was neat, if I do say so myself.

TOQ: In the Northwest Quartet and Fire And Rain, I was especially impressed with how you can blend intense drama with light comedy, classical eloquence with pop-culture slang and vulgarity. Joss Whedon and Quentin Tarantino came to mind. Do you pay attention to popular culture? Do you watch movies or television? Name some favorite writers, directors, movies, TV shows.

Harold Covington: I don’t watch television any more, and haven’t for a long time. It’s not just that it’s Judaized to the max and politically nauseating, it’s just stupid. Moronic. I glance over hulu.com every now and then, and I don’t see anything on there that prompts me to get cable again. Why pay $75 a month for drivel?

Movies are another matter. DVDs from the Blockbuster bargain racks are about the only form of recreation I can afford, besides a library card. In that sense yes, I have managed to keep up with enough popular culture, especially among young White people (negrofied though that culture is) so that I can make my young characters believable. I think so, anyway. None of my youthful readers have complained so far.

There are certain movies that just plain creep me out, like Naked Lunch, and there are certain flicks I find fascinating because they’re just plain bizarre, like Dark Star and the American version of Kingdom Hospital, which IMHO is the just plain weirdest thing ever shown on television. My own DVD collection includes Henry the Fifth, (Kenneth Branagh version), Zulu, The 13th Warrior, The Outlaw Josey Wales, and a few oddballs from the 70s like Time After Time and Absolution. I gave some friends of mine the first five episodes of Sharpe’s Rifles. I like a lot of escapist swashbuckling stuff, as you can tell.

TOQ: Do you plan to write any more novels?

Harold Covington: At this point I would say probably not. I’m pretty much NVA’ed out. There is a limit to what can be accomplished through fantasy and the creation of a fictional mythos. If I have not yet succeeded in imparting a vision of possibility to our people in the four Northwest novels already extant, I probably never will. I am concentrating henceforth on trying to turn the vision into reality through the Northwest Front, the “Party” of the novels, and it’s a five-star bitch. Getting “our” people to peep out from behind their computers and commit a real live physical act out here in the real world is like pulling teeth. Half of my contacts I can’t even get to respond to an e-mail.

I still have some bits and pieces of novels and stories lying around in manuscript form and on my computer, plus some ideas I’d like to play with if I ever get the time and the right situation (like the long prison sentence on some ridiculous fabricated charge which I’m sure our lords and masters would like to oblige me with). The main one is a kind of adult version of the Harry Potter series where a secret society of powerful Aryan spirits operating in a kind of nether world one step above this dimension use their magical powers to try and reverse the destruction of our people wrought by the Sauron-like Jewish overlord of the Dark World, although it would hopefully come across a little more convincing than that. I doubt I’ll ever get around to it, though. I need to concentrate what time I have left on building something in the real world.

Read Part 4 here.