Harrison alludes to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, the quintessential Western examination of the horrors engendered by European discovery and exploitation of Africa. Conrad was once Harrison's favorite author, and he also admires Karen Blixen's Out of Africa as a nearly perfect prose meditation. But for a writer and a teacher of writing in a university context, it seems clear that many writers, all writers, have influenced him. The Blood Latitudes alludes to many writers and texts from Ernest Hemingway to George Adamson. It is clear that Harrison knows the history and the brutal realities of European colonialism, of the WWI realignment of colonial properties, and the post-WWII independence movements that revealed how much the indigenous peoples had learned from their colonial masters. However, he says that "Africa itself has always been the greater intoxicant.

I think I need to go back again."