“Fergie, what are we going to do? We’re dogs!”
Cooper is a long-haired, droopy eared boy, a “scaredy cat” who always wears a baseball cap featuring his favorite team the Boston Red Sox. His family has just moved from the big city in Boston, Massachusetts to the deep woods of Maine for his mom’s job (cue the Stephen King allusions). He misses his old buddies, Gary and Todd, in Boston. His obnoxious older brother Mickey plays lots of pranks on Cooper, and during the night he hears the sounds of barking and howling. But in the morning, there are no signs of paw prints anywhere. Cooper then starts seeing a pair of big black labradors chasing him and then seem to disappear, even running right through doors. His parents brush aside his concerns, believing he is merely struggling to adjust to the new house. However, he is repeatedly attacked by the pair of dogs and he meets a quirky red-haired, green-eyed girl named Margaret Ferguson (who goes by the name “Fergie”). They quickly become friends and decide to hunt down the pair of malicious dogs.
But when they track down the dogs, they are led into a strange shack in the woods. Here, the two dogs start speaking in English to Cooper and Fergie. The dogs explain that they are actually ghost dogs. Centuries ago, they had an evil spell cast on them to roam these woods, haunting the region as ghost dogs, and this little shack is actually a “changing room.” They have now been waiting a hundred years to trade places with someone.
And so, Cooper and Fergie suddenly become ghost dogs, themselves, thanks to being in the changing shed (complete with ghost dog fleas and rapacious ghost dogs appetites). Meanwhile, the two former ghost dogs take-over the bodies of Cooper and Fergie (in the book, they are referred to as the “bogus” Cooper and the “bogus” Fergie). And unfortunately, now that Cooper and Fergie are ghost dogs, they cannot communicate with their families. They can only bark.
“We are not dogs. We are people”
In the end, Cooper and Fergie manage to lure the two former ghost dogs back to the “changing shed” in the woods but something goes wrong and they are transformed again, only this time into chipmunks… yup.
My Thoughts on The Barking Ghost
As one of two Goosebumps books with which R.L. Stine expressed dissatisfaction (the other being Go Eat Worms!), The Barking Ghost has a ghostly, spooky aesthetic in the first half or so of the book, but it goes completely off the rails toward the end. This book seems to have been constructed around a simple children’s horror concept, the fear of big dogs. However, it completely misses the mark in my view. It has far too many eye-rolling jump-scare pranks in the first half of the book and the twist-ending is never really explained. Who were the ghost dogs when they were human? Why were they cursed? Where did the “changing room” shack come from? How exactly does the magic work? Answers are never provided in the book and the ending is wholly unsatisfying. Still, I’d say there are still a few Goosebumps books worse than this one, but not many. Once again, the real standout with this book is Tim Jacobus’s inspired cover artwork.
Corresponding Episode Review
This campy, low-budget episode isn’t worth anybody’s time. It’s filled with terrible acting and music, and it looks like it was shot on home-made camera. It features a few notable differences from the book, such as a brief prologue with a pair of treasure hunters who meet at a “changing tree” (apparently they become the “ghost dogs”), and Cooper’s brother plays a more outsized role, but it’s just not even worth discussing.
Stine, R.L. The Barking Dog. Scholastic, Inc., New York, NY, 1995.