Conte cruel

The conte cruel (French for "cruel tale") 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. Some critics use the label to refer only to non-supernatural horror stories, especially those that have nasty climactic twists, but it is applicable to any story whose conclusion exploits the cruel aspects of the 'irony of fate'".^[1] Contes cruels by Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam is the origin of this short story genre name.^[2]

Two noted writers in the conte cruel genre are Maurice Level^[3] and Patricia Highsmith.^[4] 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,^[5] in particular the works of Thomas M. Disch and John Sladek.^[5]