The conte cruel is, as The A to Z of Fantasy Literature by Brian Stableford states, a "short-story genre that takes its name from an 1883 collection by Villiers de l'Isle-Adam", although previous examples had been provided by such writers as Edgar Allan Poe.
Also taking its name from this collection is Contes cruels (Cruel Tales), a two-volume set of about 150 tales and short stories by the 19th-century French writer Octave Mirbeau, collected and edited by Pierre Michel and Jean-François Nivet and published in two volumes in 1990 by Librairie Séguier.
Some noted writers in the conte cruel genre are Charles Birkin, Maurice Level, Patricia Highsmith[2] and Roald Dahl, the latter of whom wrote Tales of the Unexpected.
H. P. Lovecraft observed of Level's fiction in his essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature" (1927): "This type, however, is less a part of the weird tradition than a class peculiar to itself—the so-called conte cruel, in which the wrenching of the emotions is accomplished through dramatic tantalizations, frustrations, and gruesome physical horrors".
[3] Brian M. Stableford observed that, by the 1980s, the conte cruel was the standard narrative form of soft science fiction,[4] in particular the works of Thomas M. Disch and John Sladek.