YMMV / Blood Meridian

• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: 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 Fridge Horror if you consider the interpretation that he's 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.
• Complete Monster: Judge Holden is introduced casually ruining a man's life by claiming him guilty of a crime several towns over, before confessing he had never met the man before and just destroyed his life for giggles. 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 then the others. Holden thinks nothing of murdering children, and they tend to go missing from areas he visits after he is seen tempting them with sweets. The true nature of Holden is left ambiguous, but regardless he is a creature who desires nothing less than permanent violence and closes the novel with a murder implied to be too horrible to show even in the story's depressingly bleak world.
• Funny Moments: The book is anything but funny for the most part, but there are times where it verges into darkly hilarious.
  • 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... then they start laughing.
  • 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".
  • One night while the gang is around a campfire, the Judge is about to perform a coin trick for a very unenthusiastic David Brown:
    "Where is the coin Davy?
    I'll notify you where to put the coin."
• Hard-to-Adapt Work: Although Cormac McCarthy has seen many of his works adapted to film, Blood Meridian is not one of them. The violent nature and complex plot would make it difficult to write. A film perhaps could be done, but it would take dedication and no regards for censors.
• Jerkass Woobie: 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 pay him for sweeping the floor, 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.
• Love to Hate: Judge Holden is considered by many to be one of the most terrifying villains in all of literature, which is also why he is one of the most memorable villains in literature due to how nightmarishly compelling he is.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • "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, 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 murdering 35 men in a bar fight comes off as tame in comparison.
  • "War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god."^note "Brown studied the judge. You're crazy Holden. Crazy at last. The judge smiled."
• Narm: While much of the violence is portrayed horrifyingly straight, sometimes it gets so over the top and ludicrous that it's difficult to take it seriously.
  • Black Jackson chopping off White Jackson's head with a Bowie knife. 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. 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. It's as weirdly funny as it is creepy.
  • 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 Rule of Symbolism is in play as it is for most — if not all — of the book, you'd almost expect Holden to grow a Dastardly Whiplash-style mustache at that point and start twirling it.
  • Most of the time, McCarthy's extensive use of similes and metaphors do an excellent job at building atmosphere and tone, but there are a couple of them that can just fall flat for some and cause a bit of unintentional laughter, like the comparison of the rising sun to a penis head at one point, or referring to blood-drinking bats as "dark satanic hummingbirds", which doesn't exactly inspire any fear.
• Nausea Fuel:
  • The entirety of the Comanche attack. Between the dizzying almost complete lack of punctuation coupled with the extremely gory visuals does not make for an appetizing read.
  • The massacre in the Indian camp, particularly, this part:
    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.
• Nightmare Fuel: It'd be easier to find passages that don't contain some.
  • Judge Holden is Nightmare Fuel incarnate. Not surprising that Harold Bloom declared him the most terrifying literary character since Iago.
• Rooting for the Empire:
  • While Glanton and his men might seem like a bunch of badass outlaws at first, the sheer depravity of their actions (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.
  • Brutal and depraved as their attack is, the Comanches don't exactly come off as unjustified in ambushing and wiping out Captain White's irregulars.
• Squick: The Idiot. The Judge ties a leash around his neck and walks him like a pet, naked and drooling, as he pursues the kid through the bone yard.
• Tear Jerker:
  • When the Kid — now the Man — offers to escort the old woman he found back to civilization, only to realize she's actually a dried-up corpse that's been sitting out in the desert for a long time.
  • At one point, some women take exception to the treatment of the idiot by his keeper, especially after discovering 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 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.
  • On the former note, everything about the Time Skip near the end is this. The Kid, having lost 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.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: 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." It's so dark that no studio will risk making a film adaptation because of this trope.
• The Woobie: 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.

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