Thought ‘Poor Things’ was weird? The novel is, too — in a good way.

There was once a slogan, “You’ve read the book. Now see the movie.” These days, if one is lucky, the opposite might apply. But still I wonder: If you loved “Poor Things,” the Oscar-nominated film starring Emma Stone, will you read the book? That would be Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel, “the most sheerly entertaining pseudo-Victorian romance since A.S. Byatt’s ‘Possession,’” as I put it in my 1993 review of the American edition. Gray — who died in 2019 at the age of 85 — was arguably the major Scottish literary figure of the 1980s and ’90s. “Poor Things” is just one title in his wide-ranging bibliography, though he singled it out as his “happiest novel.”