Known in the United Kingdom as “Britain’s Prince of Chill,” Ronald Henry Glynn Chetwynd-Hayes (1919–2001) was born in Isleworth, West London. He left school at the age of fourteen, working in a variety of menial jobs, including as an extra in crowd scenes in British war films, before serving in the British Army in World War II.
He began his writing career with a science fiction novel, The Man from the Bomb (1959), after which he sold a supernatural romance, The Dark Man (1964), which has had several film options. He sold his first horror story, “The Thing,” to Herbert van Thal for The Seventh Pan Book of Horror Stories (1966). Having noticed a great number of horror titles on the shelves of a bookseller, Chetwynd-Hayes wrote his own collection of horror stories and submitted it to two publishers simultaneously, embarrassing himself when both accepted it.
Becoming a highly prolific writer of short stories in the genre, with more than two hundred published, he was given the Lifetime Achievement Award by both the Horror Writers Association in 1988 and the British Fantasy Society in 1989. Four of his stories were adapted for the film From Beyond the Grave (1974), and three others for The Monster Club (1981). His story “Housebound” (1968) was the basis for an episode of Rod Serling’s Night Gallery titled “Something in the Woodwork” (1973).
“The Gatecrasher” was first published in the author’s short story collection The Unbidden (London, Tandem, 1971).