YMMV / Outer Dark

• Complete Monster: The mysterious trio of terrifying and elusive strangers scourge the Appalachian countryside, killing people at will. Slaughtering their way from one end of the community to the next, the three fixate on Culla, framing him for murder and killing those who come into contact with him, even tricking Culla into partaking in cannibalism. After killing many people, the trio torture and murder a tinker who rescued the baby of Culla and his sister Rinthy before torturing the baby, murdering and possibly cannibalizing it as well.
• Harsher in Hindsight: One character has this to say: "I've seen the meanness of humans till I don't know why god ain't put out the sun and gone away." In one of Cormac McCarthy's later books, pretty much exactly that happens.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Many parts from the book in general are written like scenes out of a horror movie. Of note is when the strangers pay a visit to the man that took Culla in, and the bearded one guts him with a wide grin on his face.
  • The strangers in general, really. They laid out the prototype for Judge Holden and Anton Chigurh, and to a lesser extent, the cannibals in The Road. Similarly to the former two, there's something that just seems really off and inhuman about them, maybe even more explicitly so. Culla seems to be all too aware of that fact when he asks them what they are.
  • While in one of the towns looking for a place to stay, Rinthy finds corpses hanging from a tree.
  • The brutal torture and murder of the baby at the end. By the time Culla finds it, the strangers have gouged its eye out and left a long, jagged burn mark on its side. He begs them to return the baby to Rinthy, but his efforts are in vain, as they slash the baby’s throat and proceed to eat it.
  • Really, Fridge Horror and Tearjerker kicks in when you realize the baby wasn’t even a week old when it died, it lived a sad life being abandoned in the woods by its (sibling) parents almost immediately after it was born, only to be picked up by random strangers including a filthy hobo and a sadistic group of murderers, who proceeded to then torture and mutilate it before slitting its throat. The thought that an innocent little baby who didn’t even ask to be born could go through so many horrific incidents in LESS THAN A DAY, and it didn’t even get to die peacefully or enjoy a second of the time it was alive. The worst part is, events similar to this happen every day all around the world.
• The Woobie: Poor Rinthy. She spends the better part of a year searching the countryside for her baby, and in the end, she only finds its mutilated, half-eaten corpse.