Critics' choices for Christmas: Tim Townsend.

If you're offended by graphic descriptions of bestiality, incest, Satanism, sodomy, racism, and rape, you may want to look elsewhere for your Christmas reading. Recent books by three of the country's best magazine writers are, perhaps, not your typical holiday fare, but they're sure to keep you awake in front of the yule log.

It's actually a bit of a misnomer to call Charles Bowden a magazine writer. He is the author of more than a dozen books, and admits he only writes for magazines so that he can "pour the loot into the black hole of books."

Whatever the reason Bowden writes for magazines, there are those of us who regularly search out his byline. In his work for Harper's and Esquire, and for smaller magazines, Bowden consistently works out his anger at an America he sees as corrupt and cowardly.

In his latest book of essays, Blues for Cannibals: Notes from Underground (North Point Press, $24, 293 pp.), he takes on, among other things, the evils of the death penalty, the future of the labor movement, his distrust of God, the beauty of the American Southwest, and Yaqui Indian suicides in Sonora, Mexico. Bowden writes, at times, with barely contained rage, and at other times with powerful sadness.

In the book's best essay, first published in Harper's, Bowden tells of his three years as a sex-crimes reporter for a small newspaper. The experience confused and hardened him. When he began to identify too much with the murderers and rapists, he quit, but not before realizing startling things about himself. Bowden is a good reporter and he has a fine eye for detail, but it is his ability to uncover the plain brutal truth that makes this book so good.

In Lone Patriot: The Short Career of an American Militiaman (Pantheon, $25, 259 pp.), New Yorker writer Jane Kramer tells the story of the brief rise and fall of one nativist fanatic of the 1990s. John Pitner was the "commander" of a band of Keystone Kops yeomen who called themselves the Washington State Militia, and who were each only slightly less ludicrous than Pitner himself.

Xenophobic and paranoid, Pitner believed the groups conspiring against him and his militia included the United Nations, the Rockefeller family (David Rockefeller in particular), and something called the New World Order. At local patriotic rallies, when Pitner's stock as a militia boss was rising, he would bring small crowds to their feet by calling the government "a crock of baloney."

It was this kind of leadership that brought together the men of Alpha One, Pitner's special forces squadron within the militia, a group whose principal activity seemed to be drinking beer in someone's basement. There was Fred Fisher, Pitner's second in command, who had pled guilty years earlier to raping his nine-year-old daughter. There was Marlin Mack, young and "insecure," keen on "intel" and willing to kill just about anyone. Ed Maurer, another member of Alpha One, was an auto mechanic. Maurer was also an F.B.I. informant, who would prove the undoing of the Washington State Militia.

It seems that Pitner was under the impression that Kramer was writing his biography, and she quotes him at great length. Much of what Pitner has to say is hilarious, but in a way that makes you feel guilty, right after you laugh out loud, about being amused by someone else's ignorance and misfortune. Kramer is especially good in uncovering the circumstances and experiences in Pitner's past that perhaps explain why he turned out the way he did. It's a sad and familiar story. But instead of taking responsibility for his choices and behavior, Pitner blames the government for his problems. Not surprisingly, he eventually loses touch with reality. Explaining why (his stepmother was brutal, he was kicked out of the army, he couldn't hold down a job), not how marginal men like Pitner go over the edge is Kramer's strength.

Lawrence Wright's Remembering Satan: A Tragic Case of Recovered Memory (Vintage Books, $12, 205 pp.) is several years old now (it was published in 1996), but in light of the recent sexual-abuse scandals in the church, it could hardly be more topical. Wright, another New Yorker reporter, tells the bizarre story of an Olympia, Washington, deputy sheriff, Paul Ingram, whose two teenage daughters accused him of molestation in the late 1980s.

Although Ingram, who raised his five children in a strict Pentecostal home, was innocent, he came to believe that he must have repressed the memory of what he had done to his daughters. Even stranger, his confession of crimes he never committed came at the urging of fellow policemen, many of them Ingram's poker buddies.

Wright is one of the best magazine reporters around, and this book shows why. He lets his reporting speak for itself in a way Bowden and Kramer do not, and the book is more powerful for it.

As the case against Ingram intensifies, and his "memory" of what he did to his daughters becomes more and more fantastic, he begins to implicate other members of the police department. He tells investigators about group bestiality sessions with the family dog and murderous satanic rituals in the woods near his home. His daughters have trouble keeping up with the pace of Ingram's repressed memory, and incredibly, other members of the community (including another cop once in charge of sex crimes in the department and Ingram's wife and son), begin to corroborate Ingram's stories, also confessing to crimes they never committed or suffered.

In Remembering Satan we are shown a modern-day Salem in which two daughters, who want to get back at their father for being too strict, end up with the help of the accused ruining countless lives, including their own.

Perhaps not the jolliest Christmas reading, but if you're looking for some good journalism to add to Santa's list, you can't go wrong with any of these.

Tim Townsend, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, is a student at Yale Divinity School.