Trivia / Blood Meridian

• Colbert Bump: A five-hour long video in April 2023 by YouTuber Wendigoon breaking down the novel resulted in a massive surge in mainstream interest it hadn't reached before, with the novel reaching the top of Amazon's best selling Westerns.
• Development Hell: The film adaptation. Plans stretch back all the way to the early 1990s with attempts by Todd Field, Ridley Scott and James Franco among others. The most recent attempt has been in 2023 with John Hillcoat directing and McCarthy both writing the script and in an executive producer role, but McCarthy's passing in June of 2023 has again put it into question. As of April 2024, the writer John Logan (who wrote films such as Gladiator and The Aviator) has been tapped to write the script for Hillcoat.
• Extremely Lengthy Creation: Ten years, in part because of the amount of research McCarthy did into what little exists of the real Glanton gang.
• Shrug of God: As per usual with McCarthy, he gave this sort of response to this book, including to the question of what happened between the Judge and the Kid/Man in the outhouse at the end. To quote an author named John Sepich who wrote about a telephone correspondence he had with McCarthy in 1990:
  "I said to McCarthy that it seemed to me that the kid couldn’t have lived through his experience with the judge, that I’d gotten the impression out of the Indian treatment of enemy war dead in the novel that the Judge had probably given the kid a full treatment of such things, and that some of what was going on in the latter jakes scene had to do with 1878 people reacting to that type of bloody war result. McCarthy said that he really didn’t know what had gone on in the closed outhouse, but that what I suggested didn’t strike him as too far off the mark. His answer, as were most of his answers to direct questions, more a reaction to a leading question than the presentation of a formulated response of his own."
• What Could Have Been: The rough drafts and notes for Blood Meridian, as well as the author's other works, can currently only be viewed by visiting the Texas State University library, and not much information about what these earlier versions contain can be accessed otherwise. The most information about it comes from this Slate article, which touches on some of these differences and includes two pages of the rough drafts.
  • One page shown in the Slate article is an earlier version of the jail scene towards the end between the Kid and Judge Holden. The latter is shown to have a completely different speech pattern and personality from the final iteration, seemingly lacking the Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness that he's become known for and petulantly calling the Kid a "jackass". A crossed-out paragraph of the page also refers to Holden as being "androgyne", though whether this meant he was originally going to be written as Otherworldly and Sexually Ambiguous or if it was just meant as a descriptor related to his being baby-faced is unclear for now.
  • A YouTube channel dedicated to analyzing Blood Meridian called "Blood Meridian: The Night Does Not End" has a video discussing a different ending that he saw when he visited the collection. In it, the Kid - now the Man - travels around carrying a note that he's unable to read. Whenever he had people read what the note said, they would suddenly shun him, thus leaving the Man unable to connect with anyone, and the note apparently read "The bearer of this note will kill you." This was presumably changed because the misunderstanding would easily be resolved by simple communication.

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