If you're disillusioned with the culture of celebrity, a look at Lord Byron in the early 1800s will serve either as prefect remedy or highly flammable fuel to your disdain. The flamboyant poet published the first installment of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage in 1812 and became a star. He churned out hit works and became a sought-after party guest in fancy circles. As we see in Andrew McConnell Stott's The Poet and the Vampyre, he was popular enough to be lampooned in satirical cartoons.

One cartoon depicted Byron leaving the continent in a boatful of booze and salacious women. See, while Byron could have been turning himself into England's golden boy, adored poet, and face of Romantic literature, he was doing the opposite. He was cheating on his wife with his half-sister, racking up enormous debt wherever anyone was fool enough to open a coin purse for him, and making life miserable for people close to him. Byron was dangerous.

So the celebrated poet-turned-scourge took his literarily-inclined doctor and fled Britain to hang out in Geneva. Around the same time, the poet Percy Shelley turned up with his wife Mary and her sister Claire, who'd been one of Byron's many lovers and had set up the whole rendezvous.

Considering the big personalities and voracious, nondiscriminatory sexual appetites of the principles involved, this is juicy stuff, and the Geneva period makes up the bulk of The Poet and the Vampyre. In addition to the expected drinking, cavorting, and gossiping, there was also some work getting done. Byron finished Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. His doctor John Polidori started The Vampyre, arguably the first real novel about that particular species of debonair bloodsucker. And Mary Shelley got the idea for a book she'd call Frankenstein, a literary invention that would inspire lots of movies and sell tons of Halloween masks.

McConnell's book isn't exactly scholarly literary history, but it's a detailed account of what was going on at this extraordinary, fertile moment where such inventive and edgy personalities intersected. The idea that these wild iconoclasts could be successful celebrities is exciting and also a bit of a downer. Nobody on TMZ is telling ghost stories to their poet friends just for kicks, and Twitter would have surely exposed any incestuous movie star affairs by now. No, they really don't make 'em like Byron and company anymore.