莫言作品深受魔幻现实主义影响，模糊了过去与现在，生存与死亡，甚至是好与坏。莫言在小说中构造独特的主观感觉世界，天马行空的叙述，陌生化的处理，塑造神秘超验的对象世界，带有明显的“先锋”色彩。

莫言作品风格英文版介绍：

Mo Yan's works are epic historical novels characterised by hallucinatory realism（魔幻现实主义） and containing elements of black humor. A major theme in Mo Yan's works is the constancy of human greed and corruption（腐败） despite the influence of ideology（意识形态）. Using dazzling, complex, and often graphically violent images, he sets many of his stories near his hometown, Northeast Gaomi Township in Shandong province. Mo Yan says he realised that he could make "[my] family, [the] people I'm familiar with, the villagers..." his characters after reading William Faulkner's（美国小说家：威廉·福克纳）The Sound and the Fury《喧嚣与愤怒》.

Mo Yan's writing is characterised by the blurring（模糊） of distinction between "past and present, dead and living, as well as good and bad". Mo Yan appears in his novels as a semiautobiographical （半自传体的）character who retells and modifies the author's other stories.His female characters often fail to observe traditional Chinese gender roles, as the mother in the Shangguan family in Red Sorghum fails to bear her husband sons, and is instead an adulterer, becoming pregnant with girls by a Swedish missionary and a Japanese soldier, among others.