I almost wrote Jim Varney from the Ernest movies and wound up conflating the two. Thanks for the correction.
But Earth Abides is a complete apocalypse. Sure, the people who survive do OK, but that’s because the plague just kills 99.99% of humanity in one week. So the survivors are left with a mostly intact world, just everyone is now dead.
So it’s a fairly cozy apocalypse, because they still have the houses, they still have canned goods, enough people have died that there isn’t mass starvation, it happens quickly enough that there isn’t any fighting over dwindling resources.
There aren’t Mad Max style gangs out looting and pillaging because the plague was so virulent that almost none of the survivors knew another survivor before the plague. And there’s enough stuff left sitting out that it doesn’t make sense to loot other survivors when there’s a grocery store full of stuff sitting right there.
But it’s a full apocalypse because the social structure of the past is completely destroyed. There no continuity. Communities reform purely from stragglers coming together.
Alas, Babylon is about a Florida town completely cut off after a nuclear war between the US and Soviet Russia.
At the end of the book they find out
The United States won the war and is still standing
Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam series covers the extinction of most of mankind, and the rise of genetically modified animals and humanlike beings in the aftermath. There are also human survivors. Series starts with Oryx and Crake, goes to The Year of the Flood, and then MaddAddam.
“Adam named the animals. MaddAddam names the dead ones.”
I think the extinction of most of mankind qualifies as a full apocalypse, not a semi-apocalypse.