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.

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.