Some books/writers the author has admired over the years: John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces; Celine's Journey to the End of the Night; Knut Hamsun's Hunger; Charles Bukowski's short stories; Dan Fante's Point Doom, Chump Change, others; Mark SaFranko's Hating Olivia, others; James M. Cain's Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice; James Crumley's The Last Good Kiss; Dashiel Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, others; Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night, others; Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Clarence Cooper, Jr., Iceberg Slim; Donald Goines; Jack Clark's Nobody's Angel; Stephen King's On Writing; Jack Ketchum; Eddie Bunker; Henry Miller; Jim Thompson; James Jones' A Touch of Danger; Fred Exley's A Fan's Notes; Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar; Pleasant Gehman's short stories; Bernhard Schlink's The Reader; Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea, Nelson Algren's The Man With the Golden Arm; Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, et al.