Teatro Grottesco contains four sections:

Derangements

• A child witnesses his father’s unspeakable basement experiment, and an unseen menace hunts him down in the bowels of an urban wasteland.
• A town succumbs to increasingly surreal and absurd civic projects orchestrated by a shadowy and malignantly idiotic administrator.
• Metafictional tales emerge from a storyteller whose narratives collapse into dreamlike horrors.
• A night clerk is confronted by an omnipotent puppet creature whose nonsensical existence undermines reality itself.
• A factory that may or may not exist produces novelties that evolve into monstrosities beyond comprehension, and it seems everyone is talking about it (and only about it).

Deformations

• A man confronts bodily transformation, terminal illness, and the horror of being trapped within an incomprehensible, sinister corporate system.
• Factory workers struggle to defy a new supervisor, visible only as a horrendous shape behind frosted glass.
• In four interconnected stories set in a northern border town, a man erases his existence down to the grave where his body lies; a commercial agent staying in a boarding house finds his life’s ultimate point within a jester’s costume; a winter-obsessed narrator witnesses a crummy parade and a nocturnal visitation that reveals the emptiness within everything; and enigmatic thresholds appear in the northern border town through which people vanish into other realities.

The Damaged and the Diseased

• A writer “of nihilistic prose works” seeks the Teatro Grottesco, an artistic troupe that systematically extinguishes all creative impulses.
• A man's conversation with an art critic unearths disturbing, possibly artificial childhood memories of a bizarre roadside attraction, suggesting nightmarish repercussions for us all.
• A library employee's obsession with the recorder of dream monologues leads to a revelation that illuminates his melancholic, profound, and tragically personal darkness.
• A narrator recounts his fascination with a recluse who undergoes disturbing metamorphoses in a shack by a marsh.
• An artist's recovery from illness reveals the shadow-like force animating all existence, leading him and his followers to a dead town where they confront the ultimate horror of Being.

This edition features Jonathan Dennison's original illustrations accompanying each tale. The book’s presentation includes specific binding, typography, and paper stock selected for this collection of thirteen stories.

Through each of these short stories, Ligotti's prose guides the reader through weird landscapes where human consciousness is revealed as the ultimate cosmic joke and the ultimate cosmic horror.