Sunset Collector

Illusion and disillusion

Friendship and betrayal

Ecstasy and madness

Two young Englishmen arrive in LA in 1980, hungry for experience. They dive headlong into technicolour Hollywood days, sunkissed and free beneath exotic palms. At night they slide on charm through a Sunset Strip parade of hookers, pimps, dealers, gigolos, hitmen, punks and struggling actors. They set up camp in a glamorously sleazy joint and befriend the eccentric barflies. They are a million miles away from Thatcher’s grey, dreary London town, where everything closes by 11.

Innocence collides with experience and there gradually emerges a darker vision of LA: a Manson-haunted, coke-addled, hedonistic playground. A beautiful girl appears at their door at 3am and breaks up the bachelor party. Triangular mind games herald cracks in the unbreakable friendship, then reality itself starts to unravel, on a tragicomic journey of self-discovery, reaching a climax with a mind-bending trip out into the desert.

At the dawn of the 80’s, a rite of passage journey through an impressionistic whirlwind of sex, drugs and mental illness.

Vincent Cade took a BA in US Studies at Reading. He spent over twenty years at the BBC and made short films on the side. He left to study counselling and currently works with children and young people. He has a passion for films and music from the late sixties. He lives on the edge of London with his partner and two daughters. Sunset Collector is his first novel.