Prayers to Broken Stones: Stories

Dan Simmons

Random House Worlds, Apr 13, 2011 - Fiction - 428 pages

From a ghostly Civil War battlefield to a combat theme park in Vietnam, from the omnipotent brain of an autistic boy to a shocking story of psychic vampires, journey into a world of fear and mystery, a chilling twilight zone of the mind.

A woman returns from the dead with disastrous results for the family who loves her. . . .

An old-fashioned barbershop is the site of a medieval ritual of bloody terror. . . .

During a post-apocalyptic Christmas celebration, a messenger from the South brings tidings of great horror. . . .

Includes the following stories:
“The River Styx Runs Upstream”
“Eyes I Dare Not Meet in Dreams”
“Vanni Fucci Is Alive and Well and Living in Hell”
“Vexed to Nightmare by a Rocking Cradle”
“Remembering Siri”
“Metastasis”
“The Offering”
“E-Ticket to 'Namland”
“Iverson's Pits”
“Shave and a Haircut, Two Bites”
“The Death of the Centaur”
“Two Minutes and Forty-Five Seconds”
“Carrion Comfort”

About the author

Dan Simmons, a full-time public school teacher until 1987, is one of the few writers who consistently work across genres, producing novels described as science fiction, horror, fantasy, and mainstream fiction, while winning major awards in all these fields. His first novel, Song of Kali, won the World Fantasy Award; his first science fiction novel, Hyperion, won the Hugo Award. His other novels and short fiction have been honored with numerous awards, including nine Locus Awards, four Bram Stoker Awards, the French Prix Cosmos 2000, the British SF Association Award, and the Theodore Sturgeon Award. In 1995, Wabash College presented Simmons with an honorary doctorate in humane letters for his work in fiction and education. He lives in Colorado along the Front Range of the Rockies.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Prayers to Broken Stones: Stories; A Bantam spectra book
• Author: Dan Simmons
• Publisher: Random House Worlds, 2011
• ISBN: 0307781879, 9780307781871
• Length: 428 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / Horror / General; Fiction / Science Fiction / Collections & Anthologies; Fiction / Short Stories (single author)