- The novel has been cited as an inspiration for Robert Louis Stevenson's 1886 novella The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and especially his 1889 novel The Master of Ballantrae, examining the duality of good and evil. According to Stevenson:
The book since I read it in black, pouring weather on Tweedside, has always haunted and puzzled me. It is without doubt a real work of imagination, ponderated and achieved.
- The novel Gilchrist (1994) by Maurice Leitch is a reworking of Confessions in a contemporary Northern Ireland setting, with a central character loosely based on Ian Paisley.
- James Hynes' gothic horror novel, The Lecturer's Tale, features a Hogg scholar whose intention to write his dissertation on guilt and predestination in Justified Sinner, is deflected into writing on the more fashionable Conrad.
- In James Robertson's 2006 novel The Testament of Gideon Mack the protagonist Gideon Mack, a minister of the Scottish kirk, comes across a copy of a book on elves, fauns and fairies in his father's study. Gideon learns that the book was signed for his father by one "G.M.". Like the anti-hero of Hogg's novel, Gideon claims to have had an encounter with the Devil and begins to think that his father has met him as well. He suggests that "G.M." might be short for "Gil Martin" (p. 355).
- Eve Sedgwick, in her book Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, views Robert Wringhim's character as failing to successfully negotiate the demands of the configuration of male homosocial desire existing in his society by being too manifest in his desire for other men.
- Boucher and McComas described the 1949 edition as a "forgotten classic," praising "this terrifying picture of the devil's subtle conquest of a self-righteous man" as "a masterpiece of the supernatural."[18]
- The Bad Sister by Emma Tennant is a modern-day version of Hogg's novel with a female protagonist.
- In the short film Voices, starring Sean Biggerstaff, the central character uses audio extracts of himself reading Hogg's novel to create his final apology.
