Louis de Bernieres' 'Red Dog'. The dog, in 50s Australia, becomes a local character, hitches rides, lives its own life, becomes a metaphor for rugged independance among small outback communities, gets poisoned when newcomers start changing things. Reminds me of another metaphorical tale, 'The Tree' by Grey Owl, relating the passing of the American Indian way of life as seen by a tree over a couple of hundred years.

Octavia Butler's 'Parable of the Sower' is set in a future southern US, where society is gradually breaking down. Somewhere in the North the rich are getting richer, fortifying their enclaves, consolidating power, while in the South work is harder and harder to find, life gets nearer to the breadline, there are more homeless, hopeless people congregating around the small communities, there are new violence-inducing drugs, outbreaks of murder and arson, more people head out on the road to try to escape .. gradually a choice between new slaveries and a total breakdown of all structure, trust and community approaches. The heroine discovers her own belief system: God is Change, and becomes an evangelist for another way of life, a new pilgrim. I found it all slightly unsatisfactory, though I liked the way normal life was gradually tipping into the post-apocalyptic via small local apocalypses rather than a big global one as is usually the case in this kind of fiction.