While, by some accounts, Abe resisted comparison to other authors, his fiction shares undeniable similarities both thematically and stylistically with works by Franz Kafka, Edgar Allan Poe, both authors which he is known to have read (along with Dostoyevsky, Rilke, and Lewis Carroll). As a playwright, he has been compared to avant garde/absurdist authors Eugene Ionesco and Samuel Beckett.
Across Abe's own oeuvre, many works (for example, The Woman in the Dunes, which was also made into a film, or The Box Man) share the same core themes, motifs, and aesthetic.
