Prayers to Broken Stones is a short story collection by American author Dan Simmons. It includes 13 of his earlier works, along with an introduction by Harlan Ellison in which the latter relates how he "discovered" Dan Simmons at the Colorado Mountain College's "Writers' Conference in the Rockies" in 1981. The title is a borrowed line from T. S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men".

"The River Styx Runs Upstream" was Dan Simmons's first published work, and the short story that brought him to Ellison's attention in August 1979. Simmons relates the tale in his introduction, noting that Ellison's initial reaction was this (possibly a little tongue in cheek):

"Who is this Simmons?" bellowed Ellison. "Stand up, wave your hand, show yourself, goddamnit. What egomaniacal monstrosity has the fucking gall, the unmitigated hubris to inflict a story of five thousand fucking words on this workshop? Show yourself, Simmons!"

Simmons survived Ellison's critique, and Ellison pushed Simmons into submitting it to Twilight Zone Magazine "for their first annual contest for unpublished writers" (page 16, introduction to "The River Styx Runs Upstream"). Out of around 7000 submissions, it tied for first place and was published 15 February 1982 (according to PtBS's copyright page, in April, not February).

The actual story is classic Simmons in its literary allusions, with epigraphs from Ezra Pound's Cantos; the protagonist's father is a Pound scholar with an especial interest in the Cantos (reading from it to his children), and the premise can be seen as deriving from a line in the Cantos as well.

The mother of the family has died of some unspecified illness. Stricken by grief, the father bargains (heedless of the prospect of financial ruin) with the "Resurrectionists" to have his wife's corpse technologically revived. The resurrection is a hollow one, as all higher cognitive functions are irreparably damaged, although it does function somewhat autonomously. Their family is stigmatized, and the father slowly breaks down and his classes become less and less popular until he takes a sabbatical to write his long-planned work on the Cantos. He spends most of it drunk. Simon, the protagonist's brother, eventually commits suicide. A few years later, while the protagonist is at university (sponsored by the Resurrectionists, whom he has joined) the father commits suicide as well. He graduates and begins working for them and helping to spread the living dead. He does little but work, spending his free time with his resurrected family.

"Eyes I Dare Not Meet in Dreams" was first published in OMNI Magazine in September 1987. It was inspired by his 1969 experiences in Germantown, Pennsylvania, when he worked with children with physical and mental disabilities, as a teacher's aide in the Upsal Day School for the Blind. The story forms the seed, the original form, of Simmons's later novel, The Hollow Man.

The two central characters are the Americans Bremen and Gail. Both are telepaths, the only other telepaths that either has ever known. Inevitably, they fall in love. When Gail dies of illness, Bremen is devastated. He gives up his career in mathematics and becomes a drifter. At the commencement of the action, he has ended up at a facility for disabled minors. He becomes sort of fond of one named Robby, who had been blinded and mentally crippled before birth by his mother's drug abuse habits, and resolves that before he leaves the facility (for he feels he has been there too long), he will use his telepathic power to give Robby a gift of sorts: images and sounds of the outside world.

Bremen succeeds in penetrating Robby's mental defenses, but is unexpectedly sucked into Robby's mind, where Gail manifests. The fusion between Gail and Bremen was deep and profound enough. Unfortunately, the strain of holding Bremen and Gail in his mind and in comprehending what the show up pushes Robby's obese body to the brink and over. Bremen leaves Robby's mind, taking Gail and Robby with him while Robby's body dies.

This story was first published in Dark Harvest's "Night Visions 5" in 1988.  It is darkly humorous and deals with televangelists.

A live television broadcast by a prominent televangelist, Brother Freddy, is disrupted when Vanni Fucci (a character from Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy) appears onstage, claiming to have been sent from Hell for a brief visit to Earth.

Fucci claims he was condemned for political conflict with Dante, whose vision of Hell became dominant through belief. Supernatural phenomena help him to prevent intervening.

Fucci becomes enraged by the perceived injustice and blasphemes. As punishment, nearby thieves transform into mythical creatures and attack him. He is later provoked again by the mention of a televangelist broadcast shown in Hell, resulting in further blasphemy and another attack by monsters, including members of the audience and staff. The entire ball of beasts disappears in hellfire and brimstone.

"Vexed to Nightmare by a Rocking Cradle" (besides being an allusion to William Butler Yeats's "The Second Coming") is a short story which deals with televangelism after an apocalypse. Simmons mentions in the introduction that he was commissioned to write a Christmas tale that included an "overlooked present", but that he was given free rein otherwise: one of the authors was assigned the upbeat and happy story, so the other three could be as unrelievedly grim and dark as amused them. Amusingly, the happy tale was never actually submitted, so the collection was dark indeed. It didn't help that the next Christmas they were republished in Asimov's SF Magazine "where it served to dark the next Christmas for a host of people." (p. 86). As Simmons goes on to relate, "It wasn't long before I had the reputation as The Man Who Sacrificed Christmas with a Survival Knife." It was first published in Mile High Futures in November 1985.

It is set in a flooded post-apocalyptic New York City, to which televangelists have dispatched missionaries equipped with Satellite TV reception units to convert the heathens. Brother Jimmy-Joe Billy-Bob has been sent to NYC. There he meets the Red Bantam clan, which tattoos images of bantams on its members (as Simmons notes, this is a sly reference to the publisher Bantam Books), which Jimmy-Joe interprets as the Mark of the Beast. Prompted by the Holy Spirit, Jimmy-Joe takes a survival knife that appeared as an extra present as a gift. He tells the children that "Anyone upon the roof tonight would see [the pagan and hence evil, from his perspective] Santa Claus and his reindeer." When one comes up the flights seeking him, Billy-Bob sacrifices her on the altar holding up the antenna with the survival knife.

"Remembering Siri" is a science-fiction short story; it is the first work Simmons wrote down (the original of "Death of the Centaur" presumably is the absolute first story ever told of the Cantos) in his Hyperion Cantos fictional universe, published in Asimov's SF Magazine in December 1983. Simmons used it as the seed for Hyperion (in which it appears nearly verbatim as the chapter titled "The Consul's Tale") and The Fall of Hyperion.^[1] Simmons's inspiration was the proposition, "What if Romeo and Juliet had lived?" (pg 100) For a plot summary, see "The Consul's Tale".

"Metastasis" is a horror short story published in Dark Harvest's 1988 anthology Night Visions 5.

It deals with Louis Steig, whose mother is dying of cancer. He rushes to her side, but his car crashes on some black ice. He suffers some damage to his vision and brain. While visiting his mother, he discovers a creature no one else can see, which he calls "cancer vampires", infesting his mother with "tumor-slugs". At her funeral, many of these vampires visit to feed on the now corpulent and grown slugs infesting her body. Eventually after both his sister and his fiancée contract cancer, Louis discovers that he can kill cancer vampires by taking radioactive isotopes into his body; these isotopes act as a beacon to the slugs, who are poisoned when they flock to it. In turn, these slugs poison the vampires who eat them when the vampires themselves flock to Louis.

"The Offering" is a teleplay adaptation of "Metastasis", which appeared on the TV show Monsters in 1990. It is largely faithful, but simpler version of the story.

"E-Ticket to 'Namland" was first published in OMNI Magazine in November 1987. It concerns a Vietnam War veteran who returns to Vietnam and after visiting a theme park recreating the war, goes berserk and escapes into the jungle with his grandchildren, killing his pursuers with a weapon he stole from a South Vietnamese who had returned to take revenge of the Korean government for betraying all that he and his comrades had fought for.

"Iverson's Pits" is another horror short story, published in 1988 in Night Visions 5 by Dark Harvest.

The story recounts the experience of a young Boy Scout during the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg. He is assigned to assist Captain Montgomery, a veteran from North Carolina. Montgomery, seeking revenge for a past betrayal by his former commander Alfred Iverson, takes the scout to a site known as Iverson’s Pits.

Iverson's incompetence had led him to order his men into the teeth of a Union trap. To cover his own failing, Iverson claimed to one and all that his men were cowards and had tried to surrender.

The two hide in some weeds, and they encounter a traveller named Jessup Sheads, who later reveals himself as Iverson’s nephew. Iverson himself appears, and when Montgomery attempts to shoot him, Sheads kills Montgomery.

Iverson then orders Sheads to kill the scout, but the ground opens up and devours Sheads. Iverson attempts to escape and kill the scout but is also taken by the earth. The scout survives and later becomes a historian specializing in Gettysburg.

"Shave and a Haircut" is a horror short story. It was published in Masques III (edited by J. N. Williamson) in 1989.

Two boys, Kevin and Tommy, have become convinced (mostly Kevin) that the two barbers who run the unpopular and obscure old barbershop in town are actually vampires. Despite failing most vampire tests (such as disliking garlic, crossing running water, crosses etc.) the two break into the barbershop's basement. They are captured and the truth revealed: neither barber is a vampire. Rather, they harvest blood for their resident vampire; vampires have changed over the centuries into gigantic things more akin to 1000-pound leeches than anything that could pass for a human. They bargained with the barber guild: if the guild would hide and feed them, then the barbers would be allowed to harvest a sort of purified blood which grants partial immortality to humans. The two are forcibly inducted into this grim fraternity.

"The Death of the Centaur" is a short story original to Prayers to Broken Stones. The frame story concerns the friendship between a literary-inclined teacher (based on Simmons himself) and a poor boy named Terry, whom he teaches. The teacher begins telling his class every recess a portion of a fantasy story ("The Story"). This fantasy story is the tale of a centaur named Raul (compare Raul Endymion of Endymion), a neo-cat, and a sorcerer-ape who seek to reconnect their world to the "Web of Worlds" by re-connecting a farcaster and seek the humans' help in overthrowing the lizard-ish Wizards who oppress their world. This story is the earliest and first story set in what would become the Hyperion Cantos universe, preceding even "Remembering Siri". Many elements and similarities survived into the later stories (from the name of the centaur Raul, to the concepts of farcasters and the WorldWeb, to the Shrike or the levitation barge or the Sea of Grass). Although the stories did evolve and differ from "The Death of the Centaur" over time there are a number of dissimilarities: in the Cantos, the centaurs of Garden have been exterminated in a genocide by the Hegemony, and the world The Story is set on is not cut off from the farcaster network. There are shared elements with other stories in this volume: the neo-cat Gernisavien appears as a regular cat in "Eyes I Dare Not Meet in Dreams".

Mr. Kennan began a master's program in Missouri and, unable to afford returning to the Northeast, took a local teaching job for a year.

His story follows Raul and Gernisavien, who discover a map to a forgotten farcaster portal. Pursued by Wizards, they travel to Carnval, find the key to activate the portal, and enlist the help of Dobby, a sorcerer-ape. Trapped in the city, they escape when Raul survives a Death Game against the "genetically-engineered" relic of the Wizard Wars, the Shrike. Later, all but Raul are captured. Gernisavien, who swallowed the key, faces dissection. Kennan plans for Raul to sacrifice himself while others reactivate the portal and return with an army. However, Kennan must leave early for a new job and never finishes the story. Terry, when Mr. Kennan tells him that he is leaving, rejects him. They never meet again.

In the last days, Terry claims to know the ending. In his version, Raul fails to defeat the Wizards and escapes. Dobby causes an explosion that destroys the fortress. Raul survives, but the key and knowledge are lost.

"Two Minutes Forty-five Seconds" is a very short story in "high-tech horror" vein. It was published in OMNI Magazine in April 1988. It was also published in the Stephen King-edited horror anthology Flight or Fright in September 2018.

It concerns an engineer of explosives who, through remorse over bowing to his co-workers' blithe dismissal of technical glitches and thereby contributing to a thinly-fictionalized Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, places explosives on the plane carrying himself and the culpable co-workers, thus killing them and committing suicide. The title is a reference to how long it would take the plane to fall to the ocean far below and to how much time's worth of oxygen was expended of the breath-packs found in the wreckage of the Challenger.

"Carrion Comfort" is a novella serialized in OMNI Magazine between September and October 1983. It was later expanded into the novel Carrion Comfort.