Originality of Robert Barr's Horror Story "A Game of Chess"

Robert Barr was a Scottish author. When a child, Barr’s parents moved him to Canada and one of his first professional jobs was as a teacher at Central School of Windsor, Ontario. There, he worked his way up to headmaster. Upon crossing the border into Michigan, he later was appointed the news editor of the Detroit Free Press newspaper, which is still in operation today.

Robert Barr (Left with Goatee), Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Middle Back), Circa 1907

Later in life, he moved to London where he befriended the likes of Jerome K. Jerome and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Barr penned one of the first Sherlock Holmes parodies “The Adventures of Sherlaw Kombs.” Doyle would later describe his personality as having “a violent manner, a wealth of strong adjectives, and one of the kindest natures underneath it

all.”

What about Barr's literary endeavors? Welp, he wrote a selection of forgotten novels, some of which dabble in the horror genre. What outshines them all is “A Game of Chess” published in 1893. 

Barr's "violent manner" shows through in "A Game of Chess." While William Mudford used a mechanical device in The Iron Shroud (1830) and Edgar Allan Poe used a swinging blade on the end of a pendulum in The Pit and the Pendulum (1843), neither used electricity. It was Mary Shelley who first used electricity to twitch a muscle, (galvanism) including the heart, to bring Frankenstein’s monster to life. Early forms of electrical mechanisms were known after Shelley’s popular novel Frankenstein, Or the Modern Prometheus was published much earlier in 1818, but neither Mudford nor Poe used it as a plot device.

As a result, Robert Barr is perhaps the first to use electricity in a horror short story to inflict torture and he builds terror with deft precision in “A Game of Chess” and employs his penchant for using "a wealth of strong adjectives."

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