GRIOTGNOSIS

Are you ready to EVOLve?

GRIOTGNOSIS is an entry level portal

A visionary novella of Caribbean and African inheritance — where your vices don’t stay inside your head.

The Island. The Motherland. The diaspora in between. Ancestral ground, dream country, and the machinery of a system that has been quietly farming your attention since you were old enough to hold a glowing rectangle.

GRIOTGNOSIS follows one man through all of it. Wrath meets him wearing a human face. Lust already knows his name. And somewhere behind them sits M.E. — the Manipulation Entity — with the Vice Squad assigned to make sure nobody leaves the box.

An allegorical journey in the Griot tradition: part fable, part fever dream, part reckoning. Teachers appear and vanish. Doors open onto places that should not exist. The conditioning he mistook for a personality comes apart piece by piece, until what is left is either self-mastery or another shadow to be brought to light.

Short enough to finish in a sitting. Strange enough to stay with you a good while longer.

Surreal, lyrical, and deliberately uncomfortable — for readers of Ben Okri’s The Famished Road, Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater, Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael, and Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist. Be warned: what you seek, seeks you.

Look inside

Delay is not denial… Paperback is now available

What the title means

Griot — the West African keeper of story and lineage; the one who holds a people’s memory and gives it back as narrative. Gnosis — from the Greek, knowledge arrived at by direct experience rather than received from an authority.

GRIOTGNOSIS is the collision of the two: inherited story as the route to knowing something for yourself. It is the book’s method as well as its title.

The journey

The narrator moves through seven stages, and the book is built on them: conditioning, awareness, self-observation, confrontation, integration, self-mastery, purpose. Borrowed answers fail him one after another until only lived experience is left.

The world, in its own words

• M.E. — the Manipulation Entity. The intelligence behind the system. It does not want you dead; it wants you distracted.
• The Vice Squad. Enforcers assigned to stop anyone leaving the box. Your vices, given bodies and a remit.
• The rectangles. The glowing surfaces that harvest attention. You are holding one now.
• The Island and the Motherland. Two grounds of inheritance — where the narrator is from and where he comes from, which are not the same place.
• The cards, the doors, the portals. The mechanics of passage. Some open. Some are a test of whether you should have knocked.

If you’ve read and liked

• The Famished Road — Ben Okri
• Freshwater — Akwaeke Emezi
• Ishmael — Daniel Quinn
• The Alchemist — Paulo Coelho

What readers say

An intricate, allegorical narrative where your deepest vices and emotional blockages — like Lust and Wrath — become physical people you meet face-to-face.

Amazon reviewer, 4 stars

It felt as though you were going through the author’s personal journey alongside the mental battles that he had within himself, that came across as an anime fight scene.

Amazon reviewer, 5 stars

A full-on voyage to self discovery, down a rabbit hole into the labyrinth and forwards, onwards and upwards to higher Self.

Amazon reviewer, 5 stars

Questions readers ask

Is GRIOTGNOSIS fiction or self-help?

Fiction. It is an allegorical novella — a story with a narrator, a world and a plot. It deals in transformation, but it does it through narrative rather than instruction. There are no exercises and no chapter takeaways.

How long is it?

150 pages. A novella, designed to be read in one or two sittings.

Do I need to know anything about griot tradition or gnosticism first?

No. The book explains itself as it goes. Knowing the traditions adds a layer; not knowing them costs you nothing.

Is it a difficult read?

It is an unusual one. The style is lyrical and deliberately disorienting in the early chapters, and several readers have said it took a few pages to settle into. That is the intended effect, not an accident.

Who is it for?

Readers of literary and visionary fiction, surreal and allegorical storytelling, and Caribbean and African diaspora writing — particularly anyone drawn to books that treat a personal reckoning as a journey through a strange country.

Editions

• Paperback — ISBN 978-1066642243
• Hardcover — ISBN 978-1066642236
• Kindle — ASIN B0H5R4M33Z, free with Kindle Unlimited

About Mr Crown

Mr Crown writes visionary fiction rooted in Caribbean and African inheritance. A mathematician and counsellor who left a decade in business to be initiated into traditional practices across four continents, he is the author of GRIOTGNOSIS: Are You Ready to EVOLve? His goal is evolution.

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