Hannah's penchant for exaggerated and sometimes grotesque characters coupled with his identity as a Southern writer have lead to almost inevitable comparisons with Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Flannery O'Connor. Ray, for instance, observes that "This was a friendly city, Tuscaloosa, though there were sirens to be heard most parts of the day and the state asylum across the way was full." Hannah's fiction, however, is distinctly contemporary; he writes of the New South, even though the past, including the distant historical past, weighs heavily upon his characters.