Because Distortions was released simultaneously with Chilly Scenes of Winter, several commentators have regarded it as a companion volume.

Both the novel and most of the stories are written in the present tense in a deadpan declarative style; both render characters nostalgic for the 1960s and resigned to the 1970s; both rely on non sequiturs to convey a whimsical and essentially passive attitude towards contemporary life; both doggedly maintain a cool (occasionally frigid) persona which avoids sentimentality (and sometimes sentiment); both display a dispassionate control which subordinates individuality and story to mood and nuance.

Where commentators distinguish between the two books, they generally prefer the novel to the stories, citing, first, Chilly Scenes of Winter's sustained narrative which incorporates disjointed details rather than isolates them and, second, the deadpan humor which accumulates in the service of character in the novel, of aesthetic doctrine in the stories...