Crews's Mystic, Georgia, has much in common with the modern South portrayed by Erskine Caldwell, Flannery O'Connor, and William Faulkner, although Crews's perspective on lower class white culture differs in being that of an insider. More broadly, its central symbol links A Feast of Snakes with countless other narratives, beginning with the biblical creation myth, in which a snake is used to focus the power, fascination, and danger of evil.

A particular fictional parallel is to John Updike's Rabbit, Run (1960) in its portrait of the high school athlete as failed adult.