I generally like “end of the world” thrillers. I don’t even mind those with endings that leave me hanging. That’s probably why I liked “Leave the World Behind.”

About a year ago, I wrote a piece for Gutter Review, “Apocalypse Then: The Superiority of Bygone Disaster Films,” about how in general I thought classic end-of-the-world films like “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” and “The World, the Flesh and the Devil” were better treatment of the kind of apocalyptic stories that were the currency of science fiction literature of the first 60 years of the 20th century than their modern counterparts.

Apocalypse Then: The Superiority of Bygone Disaster Films

So I went into “Leave the World Behind,” director Sam Esmail’s thriller for Netflix, kind of cautiously. What happens if I hated the film, which grew out of a production pact with Barack and Michelle Obama and starred a great cast, including Mahershala Ali, Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke? I’d hate to hate it.

No worries. The film, while long on set-up and short on “Panic in the Year Zero”-style payoff, is satisfying.

Actually, there’s a very contained version of “Panic” – released in 1962 and starring Ray Milland as a hard-nosed survivor leading his family group through the hours and days after nuclear war – in “Leave,” with the same kind of “I’m sure they’ll figure it out soon” vibe.

Added to that end-of-the-world flavor is a treatment of race and class. Roberts and Hawke play a New York City couple who, along with their kids, go for a weekend in the country to a luxurious house. They’ve barely settled in when the Internet goes out and the owner of the house (Ali) and his daughter show up. They’re unable to get to the city and need to stay over at their AirB&B. Roberts’ character is uptight and – much is made of this – hates people. Roberts’ reluctance to let the visitors move back into their own house is noted by Ali’s daughter, played by Myha’la.

Once accommodations are figured out, the next order of business is to connect with the outside world. There’s not as much “Panic”-style panic as in most movies of this type, but there is some meeting of the minds and meeting of the neighbors, a herd of deer.

There’s more made of a quest of the youngest (Farrah MacKenzie) to find the final episode of “Friends” streaming somewhere than a quest to answer what the hell is happening, and the most prominent theory, from a survivalist neighbor played by Kevin Bacon, is about as close as we get to an explanation – until the final shot.

“Leave the World Behind” is a prime example of the type of apocalyptic story that focuses on the point of view of the everyman-and-woman rather than “Deep Impact”-style deliberations by POTUS deep in the White House bunker. I like a good presidential speech summing up the disaster and urging people to remain calm as anybody, but this is a good change.

I have to admit I’m fascinated by death – which is probably understandable for a writer of true crime and crime fiction – but I’m especially fascinated by everything that follows death.

The picture above – forgive me for its “shot through glass” quality – is of a death crown, or angel crown. I’m writing a piece for CrimeReads about these bizarre artifacts of death, so I’ll save most of my explanation of death crowns for that, but I can tell that death crowns are a wreath, basically made of feathers from a feather pillow.

Folklore, especially Appalachian folklore, tells us that death crowns were found in the feather pillows of people who had recently died. I’ll tell you more in that upcoming CrimeReads article.

I’m not sure where my interest, even fascination, with death and funerals and cemeteries began. It probably had something to do with being exposed to so many funerals of extended family members when I was young. Complete with open caskets. It probably also had to do with the macabre stories and movies that I grew up on. I’ve written about that previously for CrimeReads.

Without quite realizing it, I’ve turned this interest in death into fodder for my fiction writing. I’ve written short stories about cemeteries and my crime novel “Seven Angels” is about a small town in Tennessee that was literally built around the graves of early 1800s settlers. The graveyard that is central to the story is based on my dad’s family graveyard down here in Tennessee. My main character is a woman who returns to the town of Seven Angels to help run her family’s funeral home and ends up as county coroner. The book won the Mystery Writers of America Hugh Holton Award for Best Unpublished Novel and I’m going to be working to get it out there in front of people in 2024.

I’m not sure I’ll ever get over my fascination with death and what follows, and I’m not sure I want to. It’s been more than a fascination for me. It’s been an inspiration.

Momentum is a thing. Honestly, I think it’s even more of a thing than franchise fatigue.

Remember back in 2016, before Twitter went to hell and took a little bit of our democracy with it, when the biggest thing online that spring was whether you were Team Iron Man or Team Captain America?

It was a silly twitter hashtag stunt, of course, intended to drum up publicity for “Captain America: Civil War,” which came out that summer, introduced Black Panther and Spider-Man to the Marvel Cinematic Universe and helped build momentum for the final Avengers films in 2018 and 2019.

Momentum, all but wasted over the next couple of years by Covid-delayed MCU movies and Disney+ series that seemed too little, too late.

And I liked a lot of them. I was one of the people who really liked “The Marvels” a couple of weeks ago.

Now Marvel and Disney’s momentum is lost, thanks to assholish behavior by the studios that led to actors’ and writers’ strikes that, ultimately, proved only how greedy the studios and streaming services were.

So where do Marvel movie fans like me go from here?

I’ll certainly be seeing the third “Deadpool” movie when it comes out in July 2024. It’s the only “real” Marvel movie coming out during the year.

But then … 2025 and (barring more schedule shuffling) “Captain America: Brave New World,” featuring the starring debut of Anthony Mackie as Sam Wilson, the new Cap, then “Fantastic Four” and “Thunderbolts” and “Blade.”

I’m so excited to see how “Fantastic Four” shakes out because the FF were my favorites, along with the Avengers, when I was a comic-reading kid.

But I’m probably most hyped to see Mackie continue wearing the shield he won in the “Falcon and the Winter Soldier” series.

There’s a moment in the first “Iron Man” movie when Rhodey (then played by Terrence Howard) looks at Tony’s spare suit and says, “Next time, baby,” and the crowd in the theater with me fairly screamed at the possibility of the larger Marvel universe finding its way on screen – a possibility that seemed to be a real thing when Samuel L. Jackson showed up in the end credits,

I was ready then. I’m ready now. For more Marvel.

I was startled recently to realize how long it had been since I’d been in a proper used bookstore.

I’d been to Half Price Books in recent years, and they’re good and all. And I (briefly) checked out McKay’s here in my new city of Knoxville. And there are a few other used book stores around.

But to recall the sentiment of a U2 classic … I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.

I don’t want to leave any doubt that there are a lot of wonderful bookstores where I could spend a big chunk of the rest of my days. Like Malaprop’s in Asheville, Union Avenue Books in Knoxville and 57th Street Books in Chicago. They’re all great bookstores and you should visit them, along with Tattered Cover in Denver and Powell’s in Portland and other great indie bookstores.

But I grew up haunting the shelves of musty and cluttered used bookstores, like Al Maynard’s Used Book Headquarters and Bright’s Book Exchange, both in my hometown of Muncie, Indiana.

I miss those stores, both of which have been gone for half or more of my lifetime.

Maynard’s bookstore, run by a kindly but cantankerous old guy on the second floor of a downtown building, is the place I revisit in my dreams. Maynard, who closed his store when the building was sold out from under him in 1982, posted a sign at the top of the stairs that you couldn’t help reading as you climbed the stairs. It read something to the effect of, “You just climbed 23 steps on your way up … shoplifters will miss most of those steps on the way down.”

Maynard’s store had the standard overstock of every used bookstore back in the day, including stacks of National Geographic and too many copies of “Gone with the Wind.”

But there were 1950s and 1960s and 1970s paperbacks – the good stuff, the kind you could smell when you walked through the door – by the shelf full and, incredibly, many, many old pulp magazines. A guy I know bought many of those old and crumbling pulps from Maynard when he was holding his going-out-of-business sale. So those old magazines, with classic horror and sci-fi stories wrapped in mind-boggling cover art, live on.

I want to walk through Al Maynard’s store again, four decades after it closed and the building was torn down.

Same with Bright’s Book Exchange. I fanned through one of my old paperbacks the other week and was startled to see the stamp for the store on the inside cover and it brought back a flood of memories of my fellow geeks and I hanging out and talking to Bruce and looking at his endless racks of paperback and comic books.

When I mostly got out of collecting comics, I sold Bruce my copies of the Marvel comics introducing the new (at the time) X-Men. I wonder who has those books now? Because they’re not there anymore: The store has been a paint store or something for decades. An archive search shows the last ads for the store ran in 1988.

Yes, I know what you’re thinking: I’m not just looking for a used bookstore. I’m also looked to feel the same way I did back then, when I could walk into a bookstore and find, for a buck or less, some overlooked or half-forgotten paperback horror or science fiction novel or a collection of stories that were probably originally published in one of those old pulp magazines and reprinted for a new generation to discover in the 1960s or 1970s.

And you’d be right.

No, it is not possible to go back 40 years, to when I had a less complicated life and old, used books were more easily able to divert my attention and a good day meant finding a book with a mostly uncracked spine, no dog-eared pages and yet that smell that comes only after a book has sat on the shelf for a while, waiting for a new reader.

But … maybe the next used bookstore I find will take me back to that time.

The question in my headline above is mostly facetious. There’s a lot of humor in “Cobra Kai” the Netflix series (which debuted on Youtube) and a lot of it – really, most of it – comes from William Zabka’s character of Johnny Lawrence, memorable as the psycho but ultimate sympathetic antagonist of “The Karate Kid,” “Rocky” director John G. Avildsen’s 1984 hit. In the movie, Zabka was pitted against Ralph Macchio as Daniel LaRusso, a newcomer to the San Fernando Valley. LaRusso is the sympathetic protagonist, of course, and turns for help and mentoring to Noriyuki “Pat” Morita, who becomes his sensei in karate and life.

The premise of the antagonism between Johnny and Daniel is how the “Cobra Kai” series begins, with Johnny down on his luck and Daniel riding high as a SoCal car dealer. The first season is told, to a great extent, from Johnny’s point of view as he reopens the Cobra Kai karate dojo and tries to get his life together, particularly when it comes to his relationship with his teenage son, Robby (Tanner Buchanan).

Daniel himself has a challenge, running the car dealership with his wife, Amanda (Courtney Henggeler) and being a good father to their children, Samantha (Mary Mouser) and Anthony (Griffin Santopietro). Johnny, unable to connect with Robby, rescues neighbor Miguel Diaz (Xolo Mariduena) from bullies who were much like Johnny was, Miguel turns to Johnny for not only a father figure but a karate mentor.

The first season plays out much like you would expect, with stuck-in-the-80s Johnny building his dojo and Daniel struggling to deal with his hatred of Johnny. From Johnny’s point of view, Daniel was the bad guy of the original movies, having humiliated him in front of his sensei, John Kreese (Martin Kove).

But after the first season, “Cobra Kai” morphs into something else entirely, which is what prompted me to question internet references to the series as a comedy.

At the very end of the first (of five so far) season, Kreese reappears at Cobra Kai and “Cobra Kai” turns into an over-the-top and addictive melodrama.

Over the course of those five seasons (hopefully a sixth is in the works), “Cobra Kai” becomes a mix of soap opera, karate-fu (as Joe Bob Briggs might say) action (almost non-stop fighting scenes) and character betrayals and reversals. With the threat of Kreese overshadowing the all-important question of who will be the preeminent dojo in the Valley, the engaging young karate enthusiasts who join the opposing dojos fight, switch allegiances and eventually support each other in an even larger battle against villainous Terry Silver (Thomas Ian Griffith from “The Karate Kid Part III.”)

Silver’s return pushes the stakes sky-high and the action even higher. Silver is like something out of a James Bond movie and makes Kreese look reasonable by comparison.

The resurrection of that character is the best example of what “Cobra Kai” does so well: continue storylines from the original movies and bring back actors who were memorable from those movies. Daniel’s trip to Japan with Miyagi in the second movie is recalled here with supporting characters joining the “Cobra Kai” cast, most notably Yuji Okumoto as Chozen Toguchi, who battled Daniel to near-death in the second film but returns here as a wise elder who helps Daniel and Johnny lead their forces against Silver.

The entire series is dotted with scenes flashing back to the first three movies (not yet including the fourth movie, with Hillary Swank, but fingers crossed for next season) that left me gasping that they had not missed an opportunity to revive a character or plot point.

To be clear, “Cobra Kai” is ridiculous. Karate fights break out in school hallways and crowded public places. There are some real-world consequences, including injuries and lasting trauma (notably for Samantha LaRusso, who suffers at the hands of rival Tory Nichols (Peyton List) and struggles to make her way back to beatin’ the hell out of people.

This is a crazy show and hugely entertaining. It makes Marvel storylines look restrained and reality-based.

But oh my goodness “Cobra Kai” is fun.

It was always someone else’s real estate

For an old guy, I like to think I do pretty well with technology. But after the last month of moving and setting up new accounts of various kinds – bank, cable and internet, the list goes on and on – I’m fed up with new account names and new passwords. Does that mean I won’t eventually settle into one of the other social media services? No. But I just don’t have the heart or will to do it now.

Twitter has always been odd as hell. Some of my most rewarding times on social media have been spent there, as well as some of my most frustrating.

But it was vital to me for reinventing myself after I left the newspaper industry full-time in 2019.

I had joined twitter in 2009 so I could tweet about Black Friday, which was still a thing back then. But in my hometown, Twitter has never been a mass media, so tweeting with a few hundred followers in those days was like hollering down a well. Pointless.

So for 10 years I used twitter like a lot of newspaper people: to tweet links to my stories and the stories of colleagues. To little effect, really, because Facebook sends many more readers to newspaper stories than Twitter.

But after slowing building my twitter reach to going on 3,000 followers, I took early retirement in 2019 and found myself wondering, “Now what?” That question applied to my use of twitter too. I didn’t have my own work to actively promote, but I could promote that of my friends and colleagues.

My writing partner and I were finishing up our third true crime book, “The Westside Park Murders,” that spring so that kept me busy. (The book was published by the History Press in 2021 after production delays due to the pandemic.) Then I began work on the first novel I’d written in nearly 20 years, “Seven Angels.” (The book won the 2021 Hugh Holton Award for Best Unpublished Crime Novel from Mystery Writers of America Midwest. It’s still out there, looking for a home.)

How does all this tie in to twitter?

I started using twitter not only as a way of promoting my own work, for sites like CrimeReads and, later, Daily Yonder and Gutter Review, but also making twitter friends with writers on the social media app. I actually have more twitter follows now than I did before I “retired.”

And we built a community. Not just the writers who i consider myself to actually know and who I speak with, but also some of the best and biggest writers, who I can exchange twitter pleasantries with. And not just politically active types but people who I know work to effect change.

Twitter lets a lot of people be themselves. That’s disastrous in some cases but infinitely rewarding in others.

I still think that twitter will survive, even if it goes away briefly. I think someone will rescue it and lift it up and return it to its status as the encouraging and infuriating place that it’s been.

I thought about tweeting this but decided to post it on this blog instead. Because twitter might go away and it is and always has been, like Facebook and Instagram and all the others, somebody else’s real estate.

We’re only renting space on social media, and it’s possible someone will come along and bulldoze that space.

But it’s possible someone will build a community all over again.

Because that’s what all of us have done all along. Build a community.

Some thoughts on “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” which I saw last night:

First, after seeing the “The Black Panther Will Return” screen at the end of the end credits – a bit of Marvel promotion that the studio has done many times – I wondered why more online reviews and news pieces hadn’t seized upon that. Marvel, where movies are planned out years in advance, announced something, a sequel or substantial reappearance, and nobody seemed to notice. I guess the return could be in the form of an appearance in the planned Wakanda series for Disney+, but it seems most likely the hero will return in the next couple of phases of big-screen titles, which builds to a pair of Avengers movies three years down the road.

I won’t get into spoilers much here, but wanted to note a couple of things.’

Director Ryan Coogler and Marvel were right to not recast after Chadwick Boseman died. It would have been disrespectful and unnecessary.

The sequel does pretty well with the daunting task of following an excellent film. Nothing could be as cohesive and impactful as the first film. But they did a good job.

The plot and battles are a little all over the map. But the character through-line is really well done. And the emotional toll of what happens to these characters is perfect.

Also perfect is the ending, including the sole end-credits scene.

The Wakandan characters were so fully-thought-out in the original film that there wasn’t much room for improvement here.

The new antagonist, Namor (played by Tenoch Huerta) makes a huge impression. I look forward to the future of this 90-year-old character from the Marvel comics.

Another good addition was Riri Williams, played by Dominique Thorn. Marvel does a good job introducing characters in secondary roles in big movies, ie Spider-Man and Black Panther in “Captain America Civil War.” Riri doesn’t leave that large an impression, but she’s the outside point of view in this movie and supplies a lot of the most amusing moments.

“Wakanda Forever” made a lot of money in its opening weekend, rightly so. The movie had an almost impossibly big void to fill and it mostly accomplished that.