"You see—we like to play at witchcraft! Isn't that silly? Grown-up people playing at witches."

Though not officially part of Avon's elite "Satanic Gothic" line — Roberts would later write that line's best-known title, LORD SATAN, as "Louisa Bronte" — THE DEVIL'S OWN is a satanic gothic par excellence: the small light that blazes in the background of the front cover as the heroine runs in bridal white through a dark forest shines not from a mansion window, but from the torches propped in a witches' cauldron: a simple and highly effective adaptation of traditional cover iconography, signaling a gothic with a difference. Innocent college student Isabel faces many obstacles in her path to seduction by Lucifer: wicked aunts, psychical research, lit professors offering drugs with one hand and Hemingway with the other, a girl "known on campus for being a Lesbian" — but through it all, her horrible destiny awaits. In a 1979 interview, Roberts, a librarian in private life, attributed her use of pseudonyms to a wish not to embarrass her conservative religious father – though THE DEVIL'S OWN, published under her own name, was already as outrageous to conservative religious sensibilities as one could wish for.

In the later '70s, the paperback gothic formula as constituted in the previous decade would be assailed on all sides: by feminist critical contempt from the likes of Joanna Russ, usually a source of more subtle readings than was allotted to the poor Gothic in her influential "Someone's Trying to Kill Me And I think It's My Husband"; by the encroaching popularity of mainstream historical romance, which generally focused on both halves of a heterosexual couple where the gothic gave primacy of place to a woman alone; and by the exploding popularity of the post-ROSEMARY'S BABY occult thriller and its evolution into gorier, frequently male-centered horror. The latter two genres both offered a greater range of sexual explicitness to its readers, with or without devil-worship; authors had at last the freedom to be crude as well as silly, and many erstwhile gothic readers were eager for the change, diverted by genres whose authors and publishers had noticed that the sexual revolution had happened. Where the gothic trafficked in the rich language of sexual symbolism, it tended to do so at the expense of the literal, bypassing the superficial screen of romance and delving straight into those psychological depths for which sexual love is such a useful literary proxy. Attraction, repulsion, captivity, violence, and escape were as likely to ensnare the female gothic lead in the form of a house as in the form of a man's corporeal architecture. Therein lay its essential power, and therein lay the seeds of its decline and fall.

This, at least, is the one of the accepted explanations for the hollowing-out of the greatest 20th century paperback genre, but like all accepted explanations, it is not quite right. A fair number of occult gothics, like THE DEVIL'S OWN, did include the on-page sexual detail absent from their '60s precursors. Their greatest difference from romance, even supernatural romance, may be located in the absent promise of the happy ending. But then, what can a happy ending mean, for the Devil's bride?

Read more: Lodge, Sally, PW Interviews: Janet Louise Roberts, Publishers Weekly; Russ, "Somebody's Trying to Kill Me and I Think It's My Husband: The Modern Gothic".