Justine Musk, the dark fantasy novelist who turned a famous marriage into her sharpest prose

Justine Musk

Born	September 2, 1972 Peterborough
Occupation	Novelist

On October 9, Alex Gibney‘s documentary Musk reaches American cinemas, a portrait of Elon Musk that runs close to four hours and had its world premiere out of competition at the Venice Film Festival in September. One of the voices that carries it belongs to a novelist. Justine Musk, his first wife, tells Gibney that she often felt more like an employee than a spouse. She also says it was she, not her husband, who was holding their first son, Nevada, when he died of sudden infant death syndrome at ten weeks old in 2002. Reviewing the film from the Lido, Screen Daily found her “particularly moving” when she speaks up for their daughter Vivian against her father’s public remarks.

For most of the people who will see the film, she arrives as a figure in someone else’s story. That is the irony of her public life: she trained as a storyteller, published three novels with two of the biggest houses in American publishing, and has spent the past fifteen years being quoted as a witness. The fiction deserves a look of its own.

She was born Jennifer Justine Wilson on September 2, 1972, in Peterborough, Ontario, the elder of two daughters of Terry and Shirley Wilson. She spent her last year of high school as an exchange student in Wagga Wagga, in rural Australia, then studied English literature at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, where she met a fellow student named Elon. After graduating she went to Japan to teach English, and later settled in California. The two married in January 2000.

Her literary map was drawn early and drawn dark. Asked about her influences, she named Stephen King, Clive Barker, Anne Rice, Thomas Harris and Dean Koontz alongside Joyce Carol Oates, Margaret Atwood, George R. R. Martin and Guy Gavriel Kay. In a 2007 interview she described her own books as cross-genre fiction, and the description fits. They sit where horror, mythology and the family novel overlap.

The first was BloodAngel, published in 2005 by Roc, the fantasy imprint of Penguin. It braids three lives: Jess Shepard, a New York painter troubled by visions she cannot explain; Ramsey Doe, a Minnesota foster kid who begins to sense what lives inside him; and Lucas, a musician drawn into the orbit of a demon woman. Their paths converge on a war between angels and demons that is far older than any of them. The reviewer Jessica Lux-Baumann, writing for Rambles, called it “a thrill ride of a read” with “vivid characterization”; other readers heard echoes of early Anne Rice and wished the plot had been given more room to breathe. Both reactions point to the same thing, an author with more ideas than pages.

Uninvited followed in 2007 from MTV Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, and changed direction. Written for young adults, it follows Kelly and Jasper Ruland, teenage siblings in Southern California, after a fatal car crash from which Jasper walked away. Kelly drifts into depression and club drugs; a winged, shape-shifting stranger and a gang of soulless bikers come to collect. The twist, which reframes everything before it, is a story about guilt and the price of protecting someone you love.

In 2008 she returned to the angel saga with Lord of Bones, the sequel to BloodAngel. Jess and Ramsey, now a teenager carrying an angel inside him, have stopped one apocalypse only to find that the gate between worlds is still open. They drive from town to town hunting demon hybrids who are preparing for the arrival of their leader, the Soulbreaker, the Lord of Bones of the title. Her short fiction also appeared in two anthologies edited by Trisha Telep, The Mammoth Book of Vampire Romance 2: Love Bites in 2009 and Kiss Me Deadly: 13 Tales of Paranormal Love in 2010.

Those years were also the hardest of her private life. After Nevada’s death she had twins in 2004 and triplets in 2006, and in September 2008 she announced the end of her marriage. In 2010 she published the essay that made her name far beyond genre shelves, “I Was a Starter Wife: Inside America’s Messiest Divorce,” in Marie Claire. Its most quoted line comes from her wedding reception, where, she wrote, her husband told her as they danced: “I am the alpha in this relationship.” The essay is a writer’s piece, not a settling of scores. It is about what happens to a person’s ambitions when another person’s success becomes the weather of a household, and it has resurfaced every few years since.

So has a second, shorter text. In 2015 she answered a question on Quora about how to become as successful as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs or her former husband. Her reply, that extreme success comes from an extreme personality and that its practitioners “tend to be freaks and misfits” whose first rule is to “be obsessed,” spread through business sites and was republished as recently as 2024. It reads like a novelist’s character study, which is exactly what it is.

After 2008 she published no further novels. She moved her writing online, first to her blog and later to her own site, where she wrote about creativity and ambition, and worked as a writing teacher and editor. She kept her married surname, she has said, for her children’s sake, and lives in Los Angeles.

What Gibney’s film puts back in view, without quite meaning to, is the through line of her work. Her novels are about people with something powerful living inside them, and about what that power costs the ones nearby. Her essays are about the same thing, with the demons removed. Two decades after BloodAngel, Justine Musk is still telling that story, now without the angels.

Tags: Elon Musk, novelists, Alex Gibney, Justine Musk, BloodAngel, Lord of Bones