The supermarket chain Aldi has withdrawn Roald Dahl’s classic children’s book Revolting Rhymes from its Australian stores following a complaint on its Facebook page.

An Aldi spokeswoman said the book had been pulled after “comments by a limited number of concerned customers regarding the language used in this particular book”. Other books by the legendary British children’s author will continue to be stocked, she said.

“Aldi Australia would like to inform all of our customers that we take the concerns from the community seriously,” she said.

The action followed a post on the supermarket’s Facebook page on Wednesday that the book had “an unacceptable word in it for kids!!! Not ok!”.

Aldi replied on Thursday morning that, “This particular book has been removed from sale.”

The collection of poems, published in 1982, reimagines traditional fables and folk stories in Dahl’s maniacal style.

The particular poem that prompted complaint, the author’s take on the Cinderella fairytale, casts Prince Charming as a lovelorn, murderous fanatic, who beheads Cinderella’s two ugly sisters and then rounds on the heroine herself.

“Poor Cindy’s heart was torn to shreds. My Prince! she thought. He chops off heads! How could I marry anyone who does that sort of thing for fun? The Prince cried, ‘Who’s this dirty slut? Off with her nut! Off with her nut!’,” the rhyme goes.

The ban has prompted reaction among book lovers on social media, with fans of the Children’s Book Council of Australia Facebook page saying they planned to write to the German chain to demand the books be restocked.

“This is the kind of material that kids love, because kids want to go to those darker places and to the icky places, and explore them,” Andy Griffiths, the author of Australian children’s classics The Day My Bum Went Psycho and Zombie Bums From Uranus, told Guardian Australia.

“One of the best ways to do that is with humour, so that you touch the fearsome, the fearful, the disgusting that we all know is there, and the kids need to have it acknowledged,” he said. “But with humour you take away the fear from that, it neutralises it and makes it something you can celebrate in a healthy way,” he said.

Griffiths said Dahl’s Revolting Rhymes was the inspiration for his children’s novel, The Bad Book, which was pulled from some school libraries and bookshops following complaints when it was released a decade ago.

“Parents need to be reassured that it’s OK to read about people being beheaded, particularly if they’re evil, and this is a healthy phase of children’s development. I would say to them, it’s OK if you don’t want your child reading that [Roald Dahl] book, of course you have ultimate say.

“But what you don’t have the right to do is dictate to other parents and other children what they can access, because most people are very comfortable with it and understand that it’s incredibly useful,” he said.

“The worst effect it’s going to have is to turn your children into lifelong readers.”

Mark Rubbo, the managing director of the independent bookstore Readings said he didn’t know of any other retailers who had banned Dahl’s books, but said he had noticed an increase in the number of people requesting titles be removed from his stores.

A photographic book about threatened ethnic and tribal groups and a feminist analysis of transgender politics were among the books that had recently drawn customers’ ire, he said.

“Usually I respond by saying, we’re not censors, and there are a lot of books that we sell that I or my staff find offensive. But it’s not our role to them them off the shelves. It’s up to the reader to make those decisions.”