The movie was an adaptation of a short story by Harlan Ellison. As usual, the book is better than the movie.
FYI: It does have a scifi-element, because the dog in question communicates telepathically with the boy.
As far as movies, I remember “A Boy and His Dog”. For video games, Fallout3.
WOW! That was a blast from the past! I read and re-read the graphic novel about a dozen times as a tween/teen in Finland. I kept checking it out of the library so often, that they had to put in a new checkout card in the back pocket to replace the one I’d filled out.
It’s been quite a while, but I think what I found so depressing was the passivity of the characters. They really didn’t seem to want to get off their backsides and actually accomplish anything. As I recall (it has been a while), they didn’t have much of a problem surviving, but really didn’t have much interest in rebuilding a civil society. They just kind of hung around and ran out the clock.
Has anyone suggested ‘Damnation Alley’ yet?
Personally, I loved ‘The Postman’. I read it as a serial in Asimov.
This is what I came in to suggest. I have my own one-handed sledgehammer in the garage, just in case.
It’s funny you should mention ‘The World As We Know It.’ There’s a YA trilogy by Susan Pfeiffer where that’s the title of the first book. The disaster is unusual - a collision with a meteor brings the moon closer to earth - and the enormous repercussions of that trivial-sounding event are dealt with realistically. The first book starts a little slowly, but it’s well worth carrying on. Well, if you like YA fiction, that is.
I came in here to mention those. WTWB is incredibly touching, and Threads left me sitting stock still with my mouth open and tears streaming down my face. Definitely watch this if you’re in the mood for something really depressing. Sounds strange, but sometimes that’s what you want! 
I’ll be adding a few books from this thread to my Amazon wishlist.
There’s a whole lot of what the OP doesn’t want in that trilogy. Lots of magic, monsters, the supernatural…
If you can deal with some alt-tech (no robots/cyborgs etc) you might like Oryx and Crake and The Year of The Flood by Margaret Atwood. Or for a straight up “this is what happens after nuclear war” story, Z for Zachariah by Robert C. O’Brien.
A Pail of Air, a short story by Fritz Leiber, describes how people manage to survive when the Earth is torn away from the Sun, and all the gases in the atmosphere freeze out into drifts of “snow.”
Absolutely. I wasn’t mentioning Shannara in response to the OP but rather to another post in the thread.
Definitely not what the OP was looking for.
Alas, Babylon.
Still a great novel after all these years.
Holy crap, I saw that on tv (PBS) in the 80’s. That movie nearly killed me, I cried so hard. It was really well done & very believable, which made it all the more devastating.
I’ve never had the nerve to go watch it again.
Orson Scott Card’s The Folk of the Fringe: stories set in a post-apocalyptic world, but really they’re about people and families and religion and communities. Written before he went off the deep end, and in my opinion some of the best stuff he ever wrote. (Though be warned the last story has just a little bit of non-naturally-explainable mysticism, although I like it quite a bit.)
I also second the Octavia Butler books already mentioned as fitting all the OP criteria.
Although Y, the Last Man technically fits the criteria, I thought it started strong but ended weak. I Do Not Like stories where a central mystery is presented and then not explained (and some of the potential explanations, err, don’t exactly follow the rules of physics and biology that I know).
DUH, I already posted and I forgot one of my favorite books
Evolution, by Stephen Baxter
It is actually the total story of the evolution of primates. from the first proto-primate, a shrew like creature named Pura, through the extinction event that ended the reign of Dinosaurs. Then up through monkeys, ape, proto-human, and up to the current day…Then it gets interesting. It explores what primates may evolve and what the rest of our world may evolve into post-humanity. The best part is each story, each era, each part of our past, present and future, is told from an almost first person narative. It is truly tragic, when in the first few pages Pura, the shrewlike proto-primate, has to eat her young so she can survive the winter. But you know she will survive to have another litter, because she is the ancestor to us all
These (at least, the ones I read) definitely fall into the category of “magic”. I always thought that it might be a post-apoc setting; I never thought the author would explicitly make it one.
This is what I wrote about The Death of Grass by John Christopher when I re-read it last year (contains major spoilers)
[spoiler]I read this years ago, saw the film once, and heard an edited adaptation on the radio recently… so when this got reissued I was keen to read it again…
It’s good; like John Wyndham with nasty characters as the protagonists! (And, indeed, most other people are very quick to throw off law and order as well, and look out for their own. Those that aren’t are mainly portrayed as being a bit slow on the uptake.)
The crisis is slow to build, so everybody in the country is edgy, but when the balloon goes up (as one of the characters actually says) our little group of refugees are among the first to disregard the law and shoot their way through an army roadblock the same day!
News of almost anything dries up almost immediately and our ever-growing gang travel northwards in a vacuum of news, towards a remote farm they should be safe at, sloughing off civilisation as they go…
Of course, when they get there, the place is already overfull and the protagonist is unwilling to abandon his new lackeys, so trouble ensues.
The end tries to be positive, but further disaster lurks ahead, if only because there are now way too many people for the place to support![/spoiler]
I’ll second this.
No magic, zombies, cyborg killbots, etc.
No catastrophic “event,” just a gradual global financial/social meltdown.
I came in here to recommend this. When I saw it in the theater back in the 80’s, it was a big WTF/OMG/BRILLIANT!!!11! I haven’t seen it since it’s release, but it has always stuck with me.
I recommend Souls in the Great Machine and its sequels by Sean McMullen. It is set in a post apocalyptic Australia where the population has rediscovered a medieval level of technology but orbiting EMP satellites left over from a long forgotten war frustrate nearly all further developments.