Dan Simmons — February 4, 1948 – February 21, 2026
Dan Simmons passed away on February 21st, 2026. He was one of my all-time favorite writers — full stop. I already wrote a more personal farewell over on my horror blog The Longbox of Darkness, where I talked about what he meant to me as a reader and as someone obsessed with horror and dark fiction. If you haven’t read that yet, go there first and then come back. I’ll wait.
Done? Good.
Now. I wanted to do something here on Fear Planet as my own goodbye — something that felt right for this site specifically. And the thing that kept coming back to me was Prayers to Broken Stones, his first short story collection. It’s one of my favorite short story collections by any author, not just Simmons, and I’ve been meaning to review it here for a while. There’s no better time than now. Consider this both a review and a recommendation — my final send-off to the writer of the SF masterpiece The Hyperion Cantos. Simmons shaped the way I think about horror, science fiction, and what the two genres can do when they collide.
So let’s talk about his short stories.
What Is Prayers to Broken Stones?
Published in 1990 by Dark Harvest (and later reprinted in mass-market editions by Bantam/Spectra), Prayers to Broken Stones collects 13 stories Simmons wrote between roughly 1982 and 1989. It came with a substantial introduction from Harlan Ellison — who had “discovered” Simmons at a Colorado writing conference and more or less bullied him into submitting his work professionally. Classic Ellison move, honestly. And a lucky one for the rest of us.
The title comes from T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” — which tells you immediately what kind of book this is going to be. We’re talking spiritual failure, shattered faith, broken people. Simmons wasn’t messing around, even at this stage of his career.
The book won the Bram Stoker Award for Best Collection, which should tell you something about its quality. And for fans of his later novels, it’s also a fascinating artifact — several of the stories here are “seed stories” for what would eventually become Carrion Comfort, The Hollow Man, and the Hyperion Cantos. You’re watching a writer’s entire mythology in embryo. That alone makes it essential reading.
The Stories
“The River Styx Runs Upstream”
This is where it all began. Simmons’ very first published story — a Twilight Zone Magazine contest winner from 1982 — and it’s almost absurdly accomplished for a debut. A grieving father has his dead wife “resurrected” by a corporation. What comes back is a shambling, cognitively ruined version of her: body present, person gone. And yet she stays in the house. She just… stays. The story watches the family slowly unravel under the weight of this undead obligation.
What makes it work so well is what Simmons doesn’t do. He doesn’t lean into gore or cheap scares. It’s quiet dread, family disintegration, and a brutal meditation on grief and the commodification of death. There are heavy literary allusions to Ezra Pound running through it, which sounds like it shouldn’t work but absolutely does. This feels like vintage Twilight Zone crossed with something sharper and darker — a story by someone who’d been reading way too much literary fiction alongside his horror. I love it.
“Eyes I Dare Not Meet in Dreams”
Drawn from Simmons’ own experience working with disabled children in Germantown in 1969, this one is… complicated. In the best way. A grieving telepath drifter decides to give a blind, intellectually disabled boy a “gift” — beaming the sights and sounds of the outside world directly into his mind. It goes predictably, horribly wrong. The drifter ends up trapped in the boy’s consciousness, alongside a manifestation of his dead wife, and the story’s ethical dimensions get murky fast.
Empathy, exploitation, the ethics of psychic intrusion — Simmons handles all of it with more nuance than most horror writers bother with. It’s no surprise this became the seed for his novel The Hollow Man. There’s enough thematic and emotional complexity here to fill a full novel, and he eventually did exactly that.
“Vanni Fucci is Alive and Well and Living in Hell”
Oh, this one is mean. In the best possible way. Simmons drops Vanni Fucci — the damned thief from Dante’s Inferno, being eternally tormented by serpents — directly into a televangelist’s live broadcast. What follows is grotesque, blasphemous, and screamingly funny. The serpents do their thing on national television. The preacher’s hollow empire of faith gets exposed for exactly what it is.
Simmons clearly had (and kept, throughout his career) deep contempt for the way American televangelism weaponizes faith for profit, and this story is basically a pitch-black comedy about that contempt. It’s vicious and I’m here for every word of it.
“Vexed to Nightmare by a Rocking Cradle”
The companion piece to “Vanni Fucci,” in terms of religious fury. This one drops a roaming televangelist into a flooded, post-apocalyptic New York City where he’s doing “missionary work” among the survivors. It culminates — at Christmas — in a child sacrifice the preacher rationalizes as an “overlooked present.” The title nods to Yeats’ “The Second Coming,” which is exactly the kind of move Simmons makes repeatedly throughout his career: using a canonical literary touchstone to add weight and irony to something horrifying.
Both the Dante story and this one are savage. They’d probably cause some controversy today. Simmons didn’t care about that, and I respect it enormously.
“Remembering Siri”
Here’s where Prayers to Broken Stones reveals its second function: as a prehistoric artifact of the Hyperion Cantos. “Remembering Siri” is, essentially, the Consul’s Tale from Hyperion in its original novelette form. FTL travel, time dilation, relativistic heartbreak, interstellar colonialism — Simmons had the whole emotional architecture of Hyperion figured out years before the novel existed.
If you’ve read Hyperion already, this hits differently — you recognize the bones, but the story is self-contained and haunting on its own terms. It’s a love story, fundamentally, about the cruelty of time and distance on human relationships. One of the most affecting things in the collection.
“Metastasis” and “The Offering”
Now we’re into pure body horror territory, and Simmons gets nasty. “Metastasis” introduces the concept of “cancer vampires” — invisible entities that seed tumor-slugs into their victims, then feed on the malignant outgrowths. The protagonist discovers what’s happening, and his response is to turn himself into radioactive bait, deliberately poisoning himself to poison them. There’s a sacrifice baked into the logic of it that gives the story a grim, almost ritualistic weight.
“The Offering” is the teleplay adaptation — Simmons streamlined “Metastasis” for the TV anthology Monsters (1990), and it’s included in the collection as a script. It’s a fascinating inclusion because you can see exactly what had to be stripped out to fit TV constraints, and it makes you appreciate how much the full story needs.
“E-Ticket to ‘Namland”
One of the collection’s absolute standouts. A Vietnam veteran takes his grandchildren to a theme park recreating the Vietnam War — a “ride” commodifying the trauma of soldiers, packaged for civilian entertainment. The veteran can’t handle it. The horror escalates from psychological to physical to genuinely violent as the distinction between “ride” and “real” collapses for him.
It’s a genuinely angry story. Simmons is furious about the way American culture processes (or refuses to process) the ugliness of its wars — and “E-Ticket to ‘Namland” channels that fury into something that sticks with you. The concept itself is the horror, but the execution is flawless. Originally published in OMNI in 1987 and frequently cited as one of the best stories in the book.
“Iverson’s Pits”
Historical horror done right. Set at the fiftieth anniversary of Gettysburg, a group of elderly veterans and a Boy Scout confront the buried consequences of a commander’s cowardice and lies — and the ground itself becomes the instrument of reckoning. The landscape swallows the guilty. It sounds melodramatic when summarized, but in execution it’s restrained and deeply unsettling.
Simmons repeatedly uses real historical conflicts as horror engines throughout this collection, and “Iverson’s Pits” might be the best example of that impulse. It earns its supernatural elements because the human guilt driving them feels absolutely real.
“Shave and a Haircut, Two Bites”
Small-town horror with a fantastic twist. The barbershop hide vampires, yes — but not the sleek, humanoid Dracula variety. These are bloated, immobile, leech-like things, and local barbers have become their blood-harvesters, trading the lives of their customers for longevity and membership in a secret guild. It’s EC Comics-style horror with a genuinely inventive mythology layered on top. The guild-horror angle — monsters as clients in a kind of grotesque business arrangement — gives it a weird, almost satirical edge. Reviewers consistently single it out, and I agree: it’s a hell of a lot of fun while also being properly creepy.
“The Death of the Centaur”
The most structurally ambitious story in the collection. On the surface it’s a realistic frame: a teacher (clearly Simmons himself) and a struggling student. Embedded inside that frame is a fantasy quest story the teacher wrote about a centaur named Raul, a neo-cat, and a sorcerer-ape on a world connected by “farcasters” and threatened by lizard Wizards. Ring any bells? That’s proto-Hyperion — the name Raul, the WorldWeb, the farcasters, a Shrike-like monster, the Sea of Grass. It’s all there, in an earlier, more mythic form.
For Hyperion obsessives, this is the single most fascinating story in the collection — a fossil record of Simmons building his greatest universe, piece by piece, in a different register. Even if you’ve never read Hyperion, the nested structure and the emotional weight of the teacher-student relationship land on their own.
“Two Minutes Forty-Five Seconds”
Flash horror, technically. An engineer, complicit in a Challenger-like shuttle disaster (the cover-up, the faulty parts), rigs explosives on a flight he’s sharing with his culpable colleagues. The two minutes forty-five seconds of the title matches the shuttle’s fall. The story matches the plane’s. That’s it. Short, gut-punch, devastating — one of those stories that doesn’t leave you.
“Carrion Comfort”
The collection closes with its longest piece: the original novella that eventually grew into one of Simmons’ most celebrated novels. The concept — “mind vampires” who feed not on blood but on violence, exerting psychic control over others and engineering carnage for their own sustenance — is fully realized even here, in its original form. Serialized in OMNI in 1983, it’s a complete, compelling piece of horror fiction on its own terms, and reading it after the expanded novel is a trip: you see what got added, what changed, what Simmons was always most interested in.
The Overall Review
Look. Is Prayers to Broken Stones a perfect collection? No. Some of the stories are minor — a few feel like Simmons clearing his desk rather than presenting his best work. And the brief authorial introductions before each story, while interesting in theory, occasionally drift into self-indulgent territory (or don’t tell you much you couldn’t have figured out on your own). Some critics have called it more of a “catch-all” than a tightly curated thematic collection, and I think that’s fair.
But here’s the thing: even the minor stories are readable and competent. There is no dead weight in the way you get in some early collections. And the good stories — “River Styx,” “E-Ticket,” “Metastasis,” “Iverson’s Pits,” “Two Minutes Forty-Five Seconds,” “Carrion Comfort,” “Remembering Siri” — are genuinely excellent. Not “good for early career work” excellent. Just excellent, full stop.
What makes the collection special, beyond the individual stories, is what it is as a document. This is a writer figuring out what he can do. You can see him working in different registers — literary horror, body horror, SF-horror, historical horror, dark satire — and landing in almost every one of them. That range is rare. Most horror writers find a lane and stay in it. Simmons was always restless, always reaching, always importing ideas from one genre into another. Prayers to Broken Stones is the first place you can see that engine running at full speed.
The Harlan Ellison introduction is worth reading too, even if Ellison’s voice can be a lot. He genuinely spotted something in Simmons early and championed it, and his enthusiasm here feels earned rather than just blurb-mongering.
Bram Stoker winner. Essential for fans of the Hyperion Cantos or Carrion Comfort. Essential for anyone who loves horror short fiction that actually has ideas in it, not just scares. I’d put it on any serious horror shelf without hesitation.
Goodbye, Dan
I don’t really have a clean way to wrap this up that doesn’t feel hollow. Simmons wrote Song of Kali, Hyperion, Summer of Night, A Winter Haunting, The Terror, Drood, Carrion Comfort — a body of work that spans genres, decades, and registers, almost all of it operating at a level most writers never approach. He could write a quiet, literary horror story about grief and resurrection technology just as easily as he could write an 800-page Victorian murder mystery or an SF epic built around Chaucer.
Prayers to Broken Stones is where it started. Or at least, where it first got collected. Reading it now, knowing there won’t be anything new from him, hits differently than it used to.
Buy the book. Read it. It’s a hell of a way to spend time with a writer who deserved every second you can give him.
Goodbye, Dan. Thanks for everything.
Have you read Prayers to Broken Stones? Drop your thoughts in the comments. And again — if you want to read my more personal tribute to Simmons, head over to The Longbox of Darkness. It’s over there waiting for you.
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