Stone admits to being a voracious reader and acknowledges the influence of diversified and numerous authors.

Most implicitly, Stone derives from the narrative tradition of writers such as Joseph Conrad, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Extremely engaging and intensely paced, Dog Soldiers is considered the literary descendent of Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1902). Of interest, however, is that Stone incorporates cinematic techniques into his fiction prevalent among screenwriters such as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and especially B. Traven, as illustrated in The Treasure of Sierra Madre.

In addition, Stone has publicly commented on his indebtedness to the French novelist Louis Ferdinand Celine. Stone's ability to populate his fiction with dark, disturbing personalities drawn from the counterculture of contemporary society is clearly reminiscent of Celine, most notably in his perverse artistic triumph entitled Journey to the End of Night. Likewise, the religious quality of Stone's fiction, first...