Count Karlstein

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 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 show more broad, almost like he put them in to entertain the less intelligent section of his readership. show less

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.

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

A charming, if predictable, children's book. It was written for a younger age bracket than the His Dark Materials trilogy, and that showed in the simpler writing and plot and shallower characterizations, as well as the more all-strings-tied-up ending. The audio production is not a straight reading of the book, but instead a full cast production... not exactly a dramatization, but not a word-for-word reading, either. For example, instead of a narrator reading "The crowd cheered" or whatever, there was actually crowd noise on the CD. Still, I got the impression that most of the text was present, and the readers did a nice job of bringing the slightly wackier characters to life. This book did suffer a little from tell-but-not-show-ism... show more several times it would cut away at the suspenseful part of the action, and then have the characters describe what happened to them after the fact. Nevertheless, it was an enjoyable excursion, and certainly hints at the talent and imagination that Pullman later developed in the His Dark Materials books. show less

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.