The book itself does exactly what it says on the cover. It is a comprehensive critical history of these novels from 1960-1993, using the history of the gothic from the eighteenth-century onwards, to contemporaneous social history, alongside publishing history, to contextualise the content of gothic romances. Students of social and publishing history are going to find this contribution to the scholarship extremely beneficial. The chapters cover a vast range of issues pertaining to these books, including the cover art, the broad demographic of the readers, the tendency of male authors to conceal their identities behind female pseudonyms and the earning power of individual novelists. What it does not do is provide much literary analysis of the texts discussed and what critical analysis there is appears as a mere scratching of the surface rather than a detailed discussion of any one text.
A review by Valerie Grace Derbyshire was published in the Journal of Popular Romance Studies. Here's an excerpt from it: