The Master of Silence

A young American is summoned to a house in the woods where an old man has raised his son to speak no word and hear no sound — an experiment in silence — and where a murder has been committed that only the silent man witnessed. Bacheller founded the first newspaper syndicate in the United States, buying serial rights and selling them on; this early novel of 1892 is his oddest, and the premise is genuinely unnerving.