The Bone Mother

Amazon’s shipping robot has informed me that David Demchuk’s book, The Bone Mother, has shipped. I’m looking forward to it:

Three neighboring villages on the Ukrainian/Romanian border are the final refuge for the last of the mythical creatures of Eastern Europe. Now, on the eve of the war that may eradicate their kind—and with the ruthless Night Police descending upon their sanctuary—they tell their stories and confront their destinies.

Eerie and unsettling like the best fairy tales, these incisor-sharp portraits of ghosts, witches, sirens, and seers—and the mortals who live at their side and in their thrall—will chill your marrow and tear at your heart.

Sounds spooky. Buy it on Amazon.

TransProse

Creating music from text:

Using natural language processing, TransProse reads in text and determines densities of eight different emotions (joy, sadness, anger, disgust, anticipation, surprise, trust, and fear) and two different states (positive or negative) throughout the novel. The musical piece chronologically follows the novel. It uses the emotion density data to determine the tempo, key, notes, octaves, etc. for the piece depending on different rules and parameters.

via Steen’s newsletter. You can buy the first album of generated music on Bandcamp.