Chicago, 1935
Where desire and damage tell the same lies
A queer literary historical novel
Enter the TrapLondon-trained and established at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, Dr. Eleanor Wentworth has built her life on discretion.
Eddie Langley arrives as her patient, but the Velvet Trap has already made them part of the same hidden world. Treatment becomes intimate before either woman can master what is happening.
They don't know what they are to each other, and they can't let go.
Red leather and red lights. Perfume and smoke. A turntable gives the room its pulse: Duke Ellington’s Solitude, maybe Billie Holiday's What a Little Moonlight Can Do. Behind the Red Bar is Vivian’s office, where the ledgers tell one story, the whiskey tells another, and real names are never spoken.
Brass and wood. Cool lights and deep couches. Sam is always ready to pour. Behind him hangs a rack of keys for those Vivian trusts. Beyond the door marked “Private” are the Prometheus, the Hades, and the Arcadian: rooms arranged for particular appetites. Across the corridor waits a library of exceptional art and unacceptable books.
Psychoanalyst, doctor, wife. In her Hyde Park office, she helps patients survive what her profession would rather pathologize.
Dangerous. Not cruel. A working-class reporter with a hunger to watch and a taste for restraint. In the Velvet Trap, her compulsion finds its rooms.
Proprietress of the Velvet Trap. The club is only one of her businesses. Secrets are another.
Sweet. Not innocent. With wealth and a taste for risk, she eases between Gold Coast drawing rooms and the hidden world of the Velvet Trap.
Historical images, music, texts, and artwork of Depression-era Chicago found in The Velvet Trap.
Coming Soon
Teresa Wymore writes and illustrates literary, historical, speculative, and queer fiction. As a lesbian writer, she is especially interested in how lesbian desire has been understood, pathologized, and lived within psychoanalytic theory and culture.
Original character portraits and illustrations by Teresa Wymore. Club interiors were developed with AI-assisted generation.
