By Xu Tianran

Grimm's Fairy Tales, while beloved by children around the world, paints disturbing portraits at the best of times with their tales of murder, child abandonment and cannibalism. But a recent Chinese version takes the tales to such an extreme that it was pulled from shelves starting December 2.

In Scary Grimm's Fairy Tales, published by the China Friendship Publishing Company with planning by China Media Time Co. Ltd., the story of Snow White begins with the queen catching her husband the king and his daughter, Snow White, in flagrante. Snow White runs away to the woods, where she then has sex every night with the seven dwarves. After her death, a necrophiliac prince falls in love with her dead body.

"We couldn't find the original German edition of Grimm's Fairy Tales, so we took Japanese editions as our references and translated those," said a vice supervisor at China Media Time surnamed Yuan. The first edition of Grimm's Fairy Tales actually can be found for free online.

One of those reference tomes turned out to be The Dreadful Truth of Grimm's Fairy Tales, written by a Japanese writer duo called Kiryu Misao, who had rewritten the classic tales to be even darker, and far more obscene.

The new Chinese translation only lists the Brothers Grimm as authors, and Yuan could not say specifically which versions of Grimm's tales they used for their translation, explaining that the process was "complicated." However, the Zhejiang newspaper Today Morning Express confirmed in a  December 2 report that the Chinese book copies content from the Kiryu Misao version.

"The book was not supposed to be read by children, but it was put on the children's literature shelf, so we asked to pull it," Yuan claimed, adding that they issued a notice to book vendors on December 2.

"We got the notice to pull the goods from our purchasing department on December 3," said an employee surnamed Yan of the publicity department of Xidan's Beijing Books Building.

A perusal of the shelves in the Xiaozhuang branch of Xinhua bookstore Monday turned up no copies, and a check of its availability showed that most were listed as sold out.

Other media, including Beijing Television, reported Monday that the book was removed from the shelves of major Beijing bookstores.

"Obscenity or copyright violations might be the reason for the books' removal," said an employee who refused to be named at the publication management department of the General Administration of Press and Publication. "We are now looking into the case and can offer no further details."

The China Friendship Publishing Company, which published the book, could not be reached for comment Monday.