Count Karlstein

Pleasant children's book about 2 sisters who are orphaned and taken to live with their uncle in his castle. They then find out that they are to be sacrificed to Zamiel the demon huntsman to pay for the deal that their uncle made. They are helped by their maid, her brother, a con man and his servant

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and their tutor and her maid., who all have their own stories which fit in with the main story.

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Seven out of ten.
Count Karlstein makes an offer to the Demon Huntsman - his own two nieces. Can a lowly maid-servant, her brother and a travelling magician save the girls and sate the Demon Huntsman.An atmospheric and amusing short story with lots of interesting characters.

It's All Souls' Eve and Zamiel the Demon Huntsman has come to claim his prey! He's headed straight for Castle Karlstein, where the evil count has hatched an evil plan; he'll sacrifice his two young nieces to save himself.

The Count is evil, of course, and in charge of his two young nieces. They live in a Swiss castle surrounded by forests and snowy mountains and inhabited by Zamiel the Demon Huntsman, which is the perfect situation for the Count to rid himself of the girls.

Written in almost a folklore style, this

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story has a bit of the supernatural, a little tension, and some humor.

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The reading cast on this was wonderful. The story was fabulously suspenseful and enjoyable throughout. What a great story!

I read this quite a while ago and, whilst I remember liking it, I don't remember much about the story at all. Either I should reread it or it just isn't note worthy enough for me to remember.

The plot makes zero sense. Not even the meta references save it.

Excellent gothic novel for young adults. Told in the first person by several characters, the kind and resourceful maidservant, the endangered young nieces of the count, the charming young ex-coachman, the resolute schoolmistress and explorer. There are lots of excellent sound effects, crunching

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snow, sounding horns, and so forth and the individual performers are excellent. The plot seems to become nonsensical at the end, but it may be that this is just part of Philip Pullman's faithfulness to his inspiration, the gothic novels of the time period in which the book is set. Pullman manages to get humour out of every narrators individual voice. However, I felt that the pratfalls of the cops as described by other characters were a bit too broad, almost like he put them in to entertain the less intelligent section of his readership.

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I read this aloud, a chapter or two at a time, with my husband and young teen son. There were funny bits, and exciting bits, but somehow it just didn't grab us. Maybe it works better as a solo immersion.

A nice retelling of a European folk tale. Gothic in tone, but primarily a farce. It’s pretty funny, with a moment of real terror near the end. With beautiful stylized silhouette illustrations.

A nice, friendly, fun adventure, told from different viewpoints - and so the perfect preparation for younger readers looking to branch out into the world of more serious multi-narrator epics. It might take a while to move from this to Bolano's Savage Detectives, mind.