Parenting & Family Quote by Amy Tan

There is a mischievous intelligence in Amy Tan admitting she liked the Bible for its goth factor. She’s not being sacrilegious so much as stripping “high” stories of their moral varnish and returning them to their original operating system: blood, awe, punishment, spectacle. By pairing Grimm with scripture, Tan collapses the tidy cultural hierarchy that says fairy tales are childish while holy texts are elevated. As a kid, she’s drawn to the same thing in both: narrative as controlled terror, the pleasure of looking straight at the grotesque and surviving it.

The line “The grimmer the better” is a pun with teeth. It signals appetite, not innocence. Tan’s childhood taste isn’t for comforting fables; it’s for stories that tell the truth the polite versions evade: families betray, bodies break, justice is arbitrary, the world is enchanted and dangerous at once. Calling Bible stories “very gothic” quietly reframes religious narrative as a genre - full of sacrifice, plague, patriarchal tests, and divine mood swings - and suggests that what we label “spiritual” often works on readers the same way horror does: it disciplines desire through fear.

In the context of Tan’s work, this is also a craft statement. She’s drawn to ancestral storytelling where the supernatural and the domestic sit in the same room, and where violence isn’t a twist but a language. The subtext: she learned early that darkness isn’t the opposite of meaning; it’s one of its most efficient delivery systems.