This article offers a comparative reading of Animalescos (2013), a collection of short narratives byr the Portuguese writer Gonçalo M. Tavares, and Antonin Artaud’s The Theatre and Its Double (1938), by interrogating the notions of cruelty and animality. Drawing on Artaud’s theory of the “theatre of cruelty”, which seeks to place the body at the centre of the stage and to make performance a vital shock, we will show that Tavares’s writing operates as a narrative transposition of this theatrical project. Tavares’s cruel tales, in which man is animalised, mutilated, or reduced to absurd mechanisms, converge with Artaud’s ambition: to shatter language, to disorganise forms, to reveal life in its most violent and immediate dimension. Through the cross-analysis of selected passages, we will examine how the grotesque becomes both a method of thought and a radical critique of humanism.