History YMMV / BloodMeridian

--> 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.

* TheWoobie: [[spoiler:The little girl at the end, who sees her dancing bear shot dead for no reason right in front of her. The last we see of her, she is sobbing over her pet, and is later "lost." (We don't know what became of her but in this book it probably wasn't good.) It's not hard to imagine that she was probably quite happy before that, travelling around with her father and playing music for her bear, and in a single moment of senseless cruelty all that is destroyed.]]

** "[[LeaveNoSurvivors If we dont kill ever 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]]

* BigLippedAlligatorMoment: The Kid trying to have sex with the dwarf prostitute but discovering that he's impotent could be considered one. However, it may actually be a case of FridgeHorror if you consider the interpretation that he's [[spoiler:the one responsible for the disappearances of the children, and that the horrible sight in the outhouse is the little girl from the saloon, who he raped and killed.]]

** Judge Holden buying a couple of puppies and promptly throwing them off the bridge for Bathcat to use as target practice. He's already, by that point, been established as the worst of the Glanton Gang, and while RuleOfSymbolism is in play as it is for most — if not all — of the book, you'd almost expect Holden to grow a DastardlyWhiplash at that point and start twirling it.

** Judge Holden is NightmareFuel ''incarnate''. Not surprising that Harold Bloom declared him the most terrifying literary character since [[Theatre/{{Othello}} Iago.]]

** Black Jackson chopping off White Jackson's head with a Bowie knife. [[ArtisticLicensePhysics In a single swing]]. For a book that has, up to that point, gone for nothing but gritty realism, the sheer impossibility of that part is almost comical. It doesn't help that White Jackson's headless corpse doesn't collapse to the ground, but instead remains seated upright in the exact same position he died in, not even dropping the cigarillo he was smoking.

** Black Jackson chopping off White Jackson's head with a Bowie knife. [[ArtisticLicensePhysics In a single swing]]. For a book that has, up to that point, gone for nothing but gritty realism, the sheer impossibility of that part is almost comical.

* NightmareFuel: [[UpToEleven Yes.]] It'd be easier to find passages that don't contain some.

** "[[LeaveNoSurvivors If we don't kill every last nigger here]], we deserve 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]]

* FoeYay: Between the Kid and Judge Holden. It's established fairly early in the book that Holden is a paedophilic rapist, which explains his interest in the Kid and [[spoiler:what happens in the ending]].

** The Judge's disturbing accusations of the preacher ends up crossing the line twice when he matter-of-factly confirms with a woman in the congregation that the preacher molested a goat. It leads to an equally dark punchline, where the Judge reveals he'd never met the man in his life. Everyone listening appears disturbed for a moment... [[RefugeInAudacity then starts laughing]].

** The Judge's disturbing accusations of the preacher ends up crossing the line twice when he matter-of-factly confirms with a woman in the congregation that the preacher molested a goat.

* RootingForTheEmpire: While Glanton and his men might seem like a bunch of badass outlaws at first, the sheer depravity of their actions ([[MoralEventHorizon especially in the aforementioned scene in the Indian camp]]) is off-putting enough for the reader to find them morally repulsive. It doesn't help that there aren't many decent characters in the book to begin with. Once it's revealed that the Mexican army is pursuing the gang, it's easy to start hoping they'll succeed in their mission by wiping out Glanton and his compatriots.

* HardToAdaptWork: Although many Creator/CormacMcCarthy books have been adapted to film, ''Blood Meridian'' is not one of them. The novel has a complex plot that's filled with boatloads of {{Gorn}} that would make it incredibly difficult to adapt to the big screen.

* TooBleakStoppedCaring: Owing to this being one of the darkest books ever written, some readers will inevitably see it as a gratuitously violent and terrifyingly depressing book, with the borderline EvilVersusEvil and [[spoiler: ShootTheShaggyDog ending]] doing little to improve their opinion.

* DarknessInducedAudienceApathy: Owing to this being one of the darkest books ever written, some readers will inevitably see it as a gratuitously violent and terrifyingly depressing book, with the borderline EvilVersusEvil and [[spoiler: ShootTheShaggyDog ending]] doing little to improve their opinion.

* NauseaFuel: The massacre in the Indian camp, particularly, this part:

** While drunk, Black Jackson goes rampaging through the streets with his pistols brandished, "vowing to Shoot the
ass off Jesus Christ, the longlegged white son of a bitch".

* 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 no longer has any place in a world where the Judge holds sway.

** On the former note, everything about the TimeSkip near the end is this. The Kid, having lost [[spoiler:his only friends, Toadvine and Tobin, the former of whom is hanged, the latter of whom is never heard from again, is left wandering a lawless America, unable to do anything about the increasing violence across the country, and is at risk of succumbing to the evil himself. One interpretation of the ending suggests that he did.]]

* CompleteMonster: Judge Holden is one of the most famous and memorable villains in American Literature. Our first introduction to him is getting a man lynched for false charges purely for the fun of it. Holden acts as a corrupting force to the Glanton Gang throughout the novel, subtly pushing them to commit more and more atrocities on the undeserving. Holden's savagery and cruelty utterly outstrip the rest of his contemporaries, and the lives he takes are often done so with more terrible violence than the others. Holden takes a particular interest in raping and murdering children. References to ''Literature/ParadiseLost'' frequently put him in the role of Satan, and he's heavily implied to be some sort of supernatural creature or incarnation of pure evil. In the end, it's implied that he performs a murder too grisly for even this dark tale to describe.

* DarknessInducedAudienceApathy: Owing to this being one of the darkest books ever written, some readers will inevitably see it as a gratuitously violent and terrifyingly depressing book, with the borderline BlackAndBlackMorality and [[spoiler: ShootTheShaggyDog ending]] doing little to improve their opinion.

** When the Kid — [[spoiler:now the Man — offers to escort the old woman he found back to civilization, only to realize that she's been long dead.]]

* RootingForTheEmpire: Downplayed. While Glanton and his men might seem like a bunch of badass outlaws at first, the sheer depravity of their actions ([[MoralEventHorizon especially in the aforementioned scene in the Indian camp]]) is off-putting enough for the reader to find them revolting. It doesn't help that there aren't many decent characters in the book to begin with.

* BigLippedAlligatorMoment: The Kid trying to have sex with the dwarf prostitute but discovering that he's impotent could be considered one. However, it may actually be a case of FridgeHorror if you consider the interpretation he is [[spoiler:the one responsible for the disappearances of the children, and that the horrible sight in the outhouse is the little girl from the saloon, who he raped and killed.]]

** "[[LeaveNoSurvivors If we don't kill every last nigger here]], we deserve 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 killing 35 people in a bar fight]] comes off as tame in comparison.[[/note]]

* TearJerker: When the Kid — [[spoiler:now the Man — offers to escort the old woman he found back to civilization, only to realize that she's been long dead.]]