As a moments page, all spoilers are unmarked!
"Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent."
Oh, where to begin? For a bleak, Gorn-laden book like Blood Meridian, this is a given.
- The first instance of just what sort of person the Kid is going to become. He rides into a town, and having had nothing to eat, he stomps into a tavern and asks if the bartender has any work for him, if only so he can have a drink. But he doesn't speak any Spanish, and the bartender doesn't speak any English. Desperate he mimes sweeping, which the man allows him to do, noting it isn't dirty. When the Kid is finished, the bartender tells him to get lost, and when the Kid makes for him, the Bartender first draws a gun, then comes at him with a bungstarter (a wooden mallet used for loosening barrel bungs). So, what does the Kid do? He grabs two bottles and breaks both of them over the guy's head before shoving what's left of the second one into the bartender's eye.
- During the Kid's wanderings through Mexico, he encounters the scenes of several mass murders, one of which involves rotting dead babies mounted on a bush. The reason he's wandering around Mexico at all? He was part of a filibustering expedition which was massacred by Comanches in a Curb-Stomp Battle. This battle consists of nearly a full page of some of the most horrific Gorn ever put to print; Comanches are described hacking off the scalps and genitals of both the living and the dead, as well as raping the dying. Later the Kid finds the severed head of the expedition's commander in a jar of alcohol.
- Animals are almost as deadly as the humans in this story: a long section's devoted to a character being attacked by vampire bats while he sleeps and waking up to find himself covered in blood and a bat still feeding on him. One of the Delawares is also attacked (and presumably eaten) by a bear.
- Actually, there is a lot of animal cruelty in this book. Everything from killing two puppies for no reason, burning dogs alive and tying them to their owners (though the owners admittedly deserved their fates), shoving mules off a cliff, shooting two horses who were doing nothing but drinking water, and unloading a gun into an innocent dancing bear at a saloon in the end of the book, to the point that it collapses and "cries like a child".
- Everything about Judge Holden. His barely human appearance is only the beginning; he regularly rapes and kills kids, he preaches the supremacy of war and killing, and he pulls the strings behind the massacre of hundreds and personally kills dozens. He is heavily implied to be Satan, Death, war incarnate, or some other Humanoid Abomination for a multitude of reasons. Despite his deathly pallor, lack of hair and massive size, he has the strength of a bear and the agility of a cat. He has an encyclopedic, almost omniscient knowledge of the world around him; he shows up whenever the plot demands it and he simply does. Not. Age. At the end, he does something so horrible to the Kid that, in spite of the many, many graphic deaths and atrocities so lavishly described in the novel, is left entirely to the reader's imagination. After this, the Judge is "dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die."
- Judge Holden's first appearance has him accusing a preacher of fraud, child molestation and bestiality in front of a tent revival, triggering a deadly riot. At a nearby saloon, it is revealed that Judge Holden had never seen or heard of the man in his entire life. Either the Judge accused the preacher of his own wrongdoings for shits and giggles, or the preacher was indeed guilty and the Judge, with omnipotence implied by the strangeness of his being, simply knew what his crimes were.
- The gang stumbles upon some horribly mutilated and castrated bodies, then raids an Indian camp, viciously slaughtering everyone they come across, including the children. After the massacre, they take a small child with them, whose company they welcome. Come the next morning, Holden (possibly) rapes, and then scalps the child, much to the horror of Toadvine. Even worse, it was totally unrelated. They had no idea who committed the massacre and cared even less.
- One of the Glanton Gang's horses casually bites off the ear of another horse, simply because its mind has been so broken by the atrocities inflicted by its owners.
- Whatever inferences one makes of the ending, they cannot be good. Every possible outcome is utterly horrific in nature. Even the uncertainty of it all is terrifying in and of itself.
- The War is God speech, is utterly horrifying not just in how utterly insane it presents itself, but how much uncomfortable truth of humanity's nature it contains. To clarify, Judge Holden says that war is a fundamental, primordial force that subverts and refutes all notions of morality simply because of its ability to allow human beings to force their will on others and define who is right based solely on who is left. In short, he believes, with absolute certainty, that human beings are only at their absolute best when they are doing the absolute worst. In light of this, the Judge's philosophy doesn't resemble nihilism so much as it resembles the Sword Logic.
- The page image of the Judge was fanart done by an artist named John D. Salvatore
, and it's one of the most popular depictions of him among the fanbase through Memetic Mutation for good reason. Everything single aspect of the painting, from its colors to its use of light and shadow, seems to evoke the absolute horror of the novel in its entirety. Just looking at it makes you feel like you're about to meet a Fate Worse than Death.
