Gene Wolfe

Worked as an industrial engineer and edited a trade magazine about plant machinery, and was reportedly on the team that developed the machine that makes Pringles.

The Book of the New Sun is narrated by Severian, a tormentor's apprentice who claims perfect memory and is lying, or mistaken, or something worse, and the reader has to reconstruct what happened from a text designed to obscure it. The archaic vocabulary is all real English words, none invented.

Wolfe wrote for readers willing to reread. Gaiman has called him the finest living American writer of any kind, and even his admirers concede the entry cost is high.