Which book/author you had read that turns out to be much more difficult than you expected?

Putting aside authors that are quite known to be difficult and often discussed here (Pynchon, Joyce, Faulkner and etc..), which author or book you've picked expecting it to be a casual read but ended up struggling with it?

For me as an ESL reader, I can honestly say there are a lot author I am struggling with even though i have been using english since I was a teenager. So, It's not easy me for to get recommendations because there are always a chance that the writing styles while feel normal to everyone else, end up much harder for me.

There was this novel particularly i want to point out Somebody recommended the book on a post in a horrorlit subreddit and the premise intigued me. Usually with horror the writing styles are not very hard, but with this book (The Dead Path) made me quit after like 10 pages because it's nearly unreadable to me.

Excerpt from the book posted by a goodreads commenter:

"Nicholas got inside and twisted the car alive. The bones of a city don't change. Perhaps its skin grows tight or flaccid as suburbs grow fashionable of become declassee; crow's feet spread from pockets–new streets, new arteries into fresh corpulence. But the skeleton of its founding roads, the blood of its river, the skull of the low mountain that looms over it with its thorny crown of television towers like its own blinking Calvary…these things hadn't changed."

It's not like I dont understand them at all, I do eventually, but it caused me to read sentences multiples times and slow down, and its hard to get absorbed into the story.

For me this is the biggest barrier in reading novels because i cannot just choose whatever topic and story I am interested about. Do you guys had the same experience? Which author caught you off guard?