Critics have placed Hawkes's novels in various categories which, depending on one's particular perspective, have their respective merits. Certainly, it is easy to recognize elements of terror and surrealism in the fiction, thus seeing Hawkes within the tradition of American fiction as practiced by Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James, and joining such twentieth century writers interested in the grotesque aspect of reality as Flannery O'Connor, William Faulkner, Djuna Barnes, and Nathanael West. Emphasizing the humor rather than the nightmare quality of Hawkes's fiction, one might place him alongside such writers of "black humor" as Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut.

But Hawkes is also a writer whose poetic prose aspires to break through the traditions of the conventional popular novel. In this mien, his forerunners are such authors as Herman Melville (as well as Poe and James) who demonstrated a similar interest in narrative perspectives...