By the by, if you are into these types of movies When The Wind Blows is a MUST SEE. It will break your heart into little pieces and leave you very upset though.
It is one of the strongest and most successful movies I’ve ever seen.
It’s sort of a self-fullfilling prophecy. Because of The Road Warrior, if the world ever ends, the first thing I’m going to do is break into The Sports Authority, grab a bunch of crossbows and hockey pads and then take off across the wasteland in the most appropriate vehicle for a world with scare resources - a turbocharged V-8 Ford.
I’d say the first Mad Max film is more realistic. Although I suppose it could be character as a pre-apocalyptic breakdown of society. It had more of a feel of society sort of “winding down”.
Not a movie or a book, but a Playstation 3 game of all things, but *The Last Of Us *seems to create an interesting post-apocalyptic world, from the little I’ve seen of it. There’s some kind of feral humanoids, like *28 Days Later *or I Am Legend, and the exact cause of the apocalypse hasn’t been specified as far as I know, but here’s the trailer. I don’t know much about post-apocalyptic life beyond what I’ve seen in Fallout 3 and Live After People :D, but this appears to be maybe 20 years after society collapsed. This is supported by the fact that the (apparently) teenage girl in the video apparently has no memory of a life pre-apocalypse.
Thank you to everyone who’s suggested other stories in this thread so far. This is one of my favorite genres, and I haven’t partaken in many of the books and movies mentioned, so it looks like I’ve got some reading/watching to do!
Thinking about it, if you take the supernatural elements out of “The Stand,” it is not too bad for realism, either. One of the things I really like about “The Stand” is how it depicts the day-by-day, week-by-week breakdown of things, and how regular people try to cope.
There are a bunch of us Post-Apocalyptic fans on these boards, and we have done a few threads on the genre if you want to search for them. 
I definitely will, as soon as I feel like I have time to read some more, what with a two-year-old and another on the way in July!
I wanted to add to my earlier post about The Last Of Us. Apparently, “[t]he cordyceps fungus is the central disaster that rocks the world of The Last of Us.” The game designers were influenced by the real-life cordyceps fungus that turns insects into zombies somehow.
I know further discussion of this game would be better suited to The Game Room, so I’ll stop after this, but I’ve been fascinated by what I’ve learned about it so far.