In 1816, Lord Byron was famous throughout Britain, but his personal life was about to erupt. Fleeing his debts, he took his young doctor John Polidori with him to Europe. Percy Bysshe Shelley met them in Geneva, bringing his future wife Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and her step-sister Claire Clairmont. The next three months were a time of sexual and artistic tension, as Mary dreamed up Frankenstein, Byron completed Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, and Polidori began The Vampyre. English professor Andrew McConnell Stott details how lust, greed, and fame fueled these monstrous creations, and while Byron and the Shelleys made literary history, the sojourn would scar Clairmont and Polidori for life.