Jesus’ Son suggested what fiction could do with simplicity, with beautiful, improvisational sentences, poetic in sensibility, incantatory in strength. There’s a generation of weed-smoking hipsters who read lines like, “I knew every raindrop by its name,” and swore on the spot to be writers.

Since Jesus’ Son, Johnson has had four other books published: a sprawling noir-ish novel; a half-serious, half-comic novella; a volume of selected poetry; and, the newest, a collection of essays entitled Seek: Reports from the Edges of America and Beyond. His talent, it seems, is versatile — restless and roving around for challenges. While nothing quite matches the gem-like glitter of Jesus’s Son (Already Dead and The Name of the World were both marred by an occasional stagey melodrama) Johnson nevertheless consistently astonishes readers with informal poetic prose and with his absurd, frayed world.

The essays in Seek (which originally appeared in Esquire, The Paris Review, Harper’s and elsewhere) may be nonfiction, but the people and places they depict bear the dreamy mark of fiction. As a journalist, Johnson heads for the margins, the ragged-edge locales where convention disappears, where politics swing far right or far left, where bullets and bombs fly and fall overhead. Nowhere Johnson goes feels safe or secure, no project is entirely rational: He’s the last Westerner in Somalia; he’s in the middle of the war in Afghanistan, listening to forbidden jazz in a near-abandoned hotel in Kabul; he’s dropped in the middle of nowhere Alaska to pan for gold; he’s hobnobbing with Christian biker revivalists in Texas.

These are obscure, fascinating corners of the world, but the most interesting discovery is Johnson himself: by turns cranky, cynical, hilarious, terrified, beatific — an always-participating protagonist of the book.

For instance, “Hippies’ is as much an account of the Rainbow Gathering in Oregon’s Ochoco National Forest as it is about Johnson reckoning with his 1960’s junkie, beatnik past. Thousands of spacey kids come to Rainbow “with their backpacks, bare feet, tangled hair, their sophomoric philosophizing, their glittery eyes, their dogs named Bummer and Bandit and Roach and Kilo and Dark Star” for a three-day party in the woods. And Johnson is there as a clear-eyed outsider: “I look like somebody from a TV news team, olive shorts, khaki shirt, baseball hat, and jogging shoes. Hey. Even socks.”

But then he buys $100-worth of mushrooms, eats most of them, and just about loses his mind. The description of his all-night freak-out gets big laughs: “Bugs Bunny with a double-barreled twelve-gauge shoots you in the head with a miracle,” he writes.

In “Down Hard Six Times,” Johnson and his wife encounter a famously unlucky pilot who flies them into the Alaskan wilderness. The plane nearly crashes and they arrive wet, cold and exhausted at their deserted claim, where they will pan for gold. It’s a great story, but then Johnson’s sentiment gets the better of him. He loves the wilderness, regards it as an Eden — far from capitalism, government, order — and a Hallmark-card vagueness ensues. He and his wife ’spend days wandering through the solitude discovering things you can’t spend, but can only keep inside ” a certain peace and a certain magic.”

Johnson’s essays falter when he’s smitten, and he’s not only smitten by Alaska. In “Bikers for Jesus’ he reveres the born-again tough guy, the reinvented Hell’s Angel. Surveying the leather-jacketed assembly at a revival in Texas, he sounds a little pious: “Jesus has saved these souls from misery and meaningless, too, from the dope, the booze, the ripping and running, the chasing after. Saved them not just to be born again as the children of God and resurrected after death, but to be born again as America’s sons and daughters — to be made brand-new right now, to start all over, to be reinvented, as is the right of every American.”

That essay and others, especially “The Militia in Me,” in which he explores his anti-government tendencies, seem a touch ideological, more tract than narrative. And narrative is Johnson’s strongest suit. The standout pieces in the book, those about Johnson’s visits to Somalia and Liberia, hold the tension and rhythm of his novels. These are terrifying, anarchic countries, insane to visit. But Johnson, thankfully, is no macho adventurer. He’s twitchy and impatient, frustrated with the hurry-up-and-wait inertia of Africa, but he’s also frightened when he should be.

“The Civil War in Hell” is a brilliant snapshot, an introduction (for most of us) to the carnival-mayhem of Liberia. In the streets of the country’s capital, Monrovia, warring factions slaughter each other in “looted wedding gowns and shower caps,” and Field Marshal Prince Johnson shows visiting journalists a videotape of his boy-soldiers cutting their ex-president’s ears off. Johnson stays in the background during this essay, a nameless witness.

Not so in the book’s final essay, “The Small Boys Unit.” Here, Johnson returns to Liberia on assignment from The New Yorker to write a profile of Charles Taylor, Prince Johnson’s rival, one of the warlords in this still-warring country. Johnson meets Taylor only once, briefly, and by that point his nerves are so frayed, he’s no longer interested in an interview. Much of the drama in the piece arises from the nightmares Johnson encounters trying to enter Liberia and gain access to Taylor. He fools a border official into stamping his passport illegally; he’s taken prisoner and lodged at Taylor’s besieged compound; he’s bombed; he is unable to leave.

“The Small Boys Unit” is a thrilling story and a brave retelling of the author’s fears and weaknesses in the face of crisis. He makes it out of Liberia, and then the Ivory Coast, but only barely, and he winds up betraying some of those who had helped him. By his own admission, he’s a flawed (and therefore empathetic) hero: “I’d come to this place and I was not whole enough or real enough to accept its terms,” he writes. At its best, Seek reveals such human dramas, with Johnson confronting the disorder and doubt in the farthest edges of civilization.

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Taylor Antrim is a writer living in San Francisco.

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