There are unmistakable references to other American writers, especially Southerners, in Airships. In "Dragged Fighting from His Tomb," a story set during the Civil War, the narrator says: "Nothing a body does disgusts me."

Almost the exact language appears in Tennessee Williams' The Night of the Iguana: "Nothing human disgusts me."

In "Constant Pain in Tuscaloosa," the memory of Flannery O'Connor's Church of Christ without Christ is evoked by a minister's saying, "I don't think Jesus wants you. He's too dead to want. He was a hell of a sweet genius guy, but he's dead." Similarly echoes of Carson McCullers, William Faulkner, and Eudora Welty appear throughout Airships.

Like many Southern authors, Hannah sees normal or conventional society, especially its religious institutions, as a fraud. The Gothic elements of Hannah's fiction usually arise from discovering the truth behind some cozy and conventional lie.