The House at the End of the World

Libby is the 14-year-old secondary protagonist of The House at the End of the World. She lives near Katie on Oak Haven Island, though at the beginning of the novel they have never met. With her “terrifically high IQ” (155), Libby has taught herself axe throwing, code breaking, and gymnastics, in addition to playing the piano and driving a boat. She is curious, determined, and loving, although she’s been emotionally neglected by her absent scientist parents, Francesca and Raleigh. Her only friend is her nanny, Sarah, but when Moloch attacks and Sarah dies, Libby is left to fend for herself alone.

Libby meets Katie halfway through the novel, and the two form a tentative alliance that deepens into friendship and trust as they plan their escape. Libby is Katie’s greatest source of information about Moloch because she broke into her parents’ government laptops to read about their experiments on Ringrock. Without this knowledge, neither of them would have survived, highlighting the fact that Libby is Katie’s complement: She provides what Katie does not have, including both information and a daughter figure, thus catalyzing the novel’s action. They also support each other emotionally, each taking strength and courage from the other in their respective moments of fear.

Libby quickly learns to love and respect Katie, appreciating that Katie is “real […] and [takes] care of business” (293). Libby sees in her the kind of parent she’s always wanted to have. In an emotive scene in a hotel when Katie wakes up to comfort a crying Libby, the girl finally receives affection from an adult other than Sarah. At the end of the novel, she has found a family with Katie and Michael J.

Michael J. Fox is a wild red fox that lives on Jacob’s Ladder. He seems unusually comfortable in Katie’s presence, not running away from her when she appears. Instead, he communicates his anxiety and fear to her. She reads in his body language when there are threats present and calls him a “bellwether of what’s coming” (146). Michael J. hence provides foreshadowing as his animal instincts inform the reader of danger to come.

Although he doesn’t play a crucial role in plot development, Michael J. plays a big role in Katie’s emotional development. When he comes into Katie's house, his companionship reminds her of what she’s been missing for the past two years. His animal instincts and simple trust help her to open up again. After the climax of the novel, she returns to find him in the car and thinks, “His beauty is the truth of the world” (353). When Katie and Libby are safe again, Katie spends time with Michael J., walking and talking with him and painting many portraits of him.

Moloch is the primary antagonist of the novel. It is a creature from outer space that feeds on pure energy and can assimilate DNA from any living being it touches. It was found attached to the International Space Station and brought to Earth to be quarantined and studied at the facilities on Ringrock Island, but part of it escaped and began fusing with many creatures in the surrounding area, destroying everyone it touched. No one knows what Moloch’s intentions are; Raleigh believes that it could be a biological librarian or an artist, but other scientists believe it to be a weapon created by extraterrestrial “paranoid racists” (259). As such, the humans in the novel project their own fears and ideas onto Moloch. The creature represents human capacities (particularly for evil) rather than supernatural forces, reinforced by the fact that it uses human faces when it combines with them.

On its own, it appears as a worm-like creature made of “amorphous tissue” that can take on characteristics, such as body structure and facial features, of any living being. When pieces of Moloch fuse with a creature, it then spawns new creatures. On Earth, most of these fusions and spawns die quickly, melting down into goo. However, Raleigh and other scientists theorize that Moloch needs practice to create stable fusions; this theory is borne out by the events at the climax of the novel, when Moloch has created a stable Zenon fusion and several spawns. This reflects Katie’s ideas about evil throughout the novel: If evil is not resisted, it multiplies. At the end of the novel, when Moloch’s mother mass is destroyed by the nuclear bomb, all the remaining fusions and spawns disintegrate. The fact that Moloch is destroyed by a man-made weapon more destructive than an extraterrestrial monster again points a spotlight on human capacities for evil.

Libby’s parents, Raleigh and Francesca, are scientists on Ringrock leading the Moloch experiments. They are cold and logical people whom Libby describes as having “a personality matrix with holes in it” (155)—Koontz uses this scientific language to reflect their lack of human empathy. They lack the ability to show affection or care for Libby and even leave her vulnerable to Moloch when they do not take steps to evacuate her. Their treatment of Libby has made her feel like a “ghost, unseen and unsuspected” (218), highlighting her need for love.

The book contains several past journal excerpts by Raleigh, who is shown to be arrogant and delusionally optimistic about what they will be able to discover from Moloch. Francesca is taken over by Moloch and dies as a fusion on Oak Haven island. Raleigh’s fate is unknown, though the narrative implies that he is dead by the time Ringrock suffers a nuclear blast. The absence of his explicit fate reflects his absence in Libby’s life.

These three men are background antagonists, only appearing in flashbacks. As young gang members who love violence and chaos, they killed Katie’s parents and daughters in a shooting spree at a strip mall and are the primary reason for her despair and self-isolation at the beginning of the novel. They are each depicted as being particularly evil for sexually and physically abusing young girls, a point that underscores The Irrationality of Evil.

Although each of them is unremarkable on their own, their power over Katie comes from their connections. Parker is a senator’s son, and, as such, he and his friends are protected from the consequences of their crimes. The lack of justice and closure that Katie gets from their actions leads her to fantasize about revenge and to paint the young men obsessively into paintings of the scene of the crime. Near the end of the novel, she dreams about them as “children of Moloch” with “greedy mouths, from which issue the screams of ten thousand murdered species” (375). This reinforces the novel’s idea that Moloch represents the evil of characters such as Lupo, Hamal, and Parker.

As a corrupt ISA agent bent on control, Robert Zenon is the secondary antagonist of the novel. He is in his mid-forties with salt and pepper hair, steel-grey eyes, and a smile that Katie finds “disturbing” (75). He is an arrogant, controlling government official of the type that Katie instinctively distrusts; she is correct in her intuition, as his backstory reveals that his plan was to take over the ISA using blackmail. He tries to keep Katie and Libby trapped on the island by stealing Katie’s boat at gunpoint. When he lies about having shot Hampton Rice, Katie knows not to trust him and leaves him behind.

He follows them to the mainland, though, already corrupted by Moloch. Once Moloch enters him, Zenon is effectively dead. The only goal of his remaining fusion self is to get enough energy to spawn many times. His body and his spawns all die, though, when the nuclear bomb on Ringrock kills the Moloch mother mass. Zenon therefore remains a static character throughout who remains sinister until his death.