History YMMV / BloodMeridian

** "[[LeaveNoSurvivors If we dont kill every nigger here]] we need to be whipped and sent home."[[note]]This quote prefaces the gang's attack on a peaceful and almost totally undefended Indian camp, with a death toll unambiguously in the hundreds. They kill men, women, and children alike with gleeful abandon, [[ForTheEvulz far more than they end up scalping]], drive the rest into the desert, and rape the women left behind as they lie dying from their wounds. After this, them [[AxCrazy murdering 35 men in a bar fight]] comes off as tame in comparison.[[/note]]

-->There were in the camp a number of Mexican slaves and these ran forth calling out in spanish and were brained or shot and one of the Delawares emerged from the smoke with a naked infant dangling in each hand and squatted at a ring of midden stones and swung them by the heels each in turn and bashed their heads against the stones so that the brains burst forth through the fontanel in a bloody spew and humans on fire came shrieking forth like berserkers and the riders hacked them down with their enormous knives and a young woman ran up and embraced the bloodied forefeet of Glanton's warhorse.

** "[[LeaveNoSurvivors If we dont kill every nigger here]] we need to be whipped and sent home." [[note]] This quote prefaces the gang's attack on a peaceful and almost totally undefended Indian camp, with a death toll unambiguously in the hundreds. They kill men, women, and children alike with gleeful abandon, [[ForTheEvulz far more than they end up scalping]], drive the rest into the desert, and rape the women left behind as they lie dying from their wounds. After this, them [[AxCrazy murdering 35 men in a bar fight]] comes off as tame in comparison.[[/note]]

** At one point, some women take exception to the treatment of the idiot by his keeper, especially after discovering [[spoiler: that the idiot's keeper is his own brother]]; they wash him in the river, dress him in clothes, and try to look after him despite his infirmity. But it doesn't last, and [[YankTheDogsChain before the night is out]] the idiot tries to drown himself and ends up a plaything of the Judge, in a similar state of nakedness and degradation as before.

* JekyllAndHyde: One possible interpretation of the Judge is that he's essentially the personification of the Kid's most evil impulses and that it is the Kid himself committing these acts and mentally disassociating while doing them, though there's [[MaybeMagicMaybeMundane also enough evidence to suggest that the Judge is, in fact, a real person]].

* JekyllAndHyde: One possible interpretation of the Judge is that he's essentially the personification of the Kid's most evil impulses and that it is the Kid himself committing these acts and mentally disassociating while doing them, though there's also enough evidence to suggest that the Judge is, in fact, a real person.

* TooBleakStoppedCaring: In case it's not ''abundantly'' clear by now, this is an incredibly dark, violent story populated almost entirely with vicious murderers. There are no heroes; even "protagonist" might be too strong a word for the kid. Potential readers should not be ashamed if they can't stomach it. Even critic Harold Bloom, one of the book's foremost champions, admitted he couldn't even read it the first couple of times he tried because of the "overwhelming carnage."

* JerkassWoobie: The Kid. He's not a good person by a long shot, being an impulsive thug who thinks nothing of stabbing a bartender in the eye for refusing to let him work, or joining a marauding gang of scalp-hunters, but there's just something so tragic about him between his backstory and his inability to escape his violent nature. By the end, he's not much more than a tired and bitter man who just wants peace, which like him, no longer has any place in a world where the Judge holds sway.