THE VELVET TRAP SERIES - HISTORICAL
Secrets of the Velvet Trap | Historical Novel, Chicago 1935
It’s 1935, and the sun has set on Prohibition as Chicago sinks deeper into the Great Depression and refugees begin to flee Europe. Secrets of the Velvet Trap is a literary historical novel set within the psychoanalytic milieu of a world on the edge of modernity.
In this unstable world, Dr. Eleanor Wentworth, a renowned but emotionally repressed psychoanalyst, finds herself drawn to a volatile young journalist and patient, Edith “Eddie” Langley. Erotic transference and shifting power fracture Eleanor’s clinical distance as their sessions evolve into confessions and their silences into seductions.
The story moves between Eleanor’s refined Hyde Park office and a hidden underground club, the Velvet Trap, where Eddie finds a sense of freedom. Beneath a commercial laundry on the Near West Side, the Trap is a speakeasy turned sanctuary, a secret haven for Chicago’s inverts and perverts seeking more than society permits. It is a decadent domain of jazz, liquor, and pleasure rooms, visited by a twilight aristocracy.
Eleanor is a woman of discipline whose need for control masks a profound vulnerability to pleasure. Married to a prominent surgeon in a mutually accepted bisexual arrangement, she leads a curated life. Eddie is a gifted writer with sadistic fantasies and borderline volatility. Her pursuit of pleasure through transgression conceals wounds of abandonment. Together, they enter an erotic storm neither fully understands.
Surrounding them is a vivid cast: Vivian Moreau, the sophisticated proprietress of the Velvet Trap, whose underworld confidence hides a tender heart; Violet Sinclair, her tempestuous lover and Eddie’s oldest friend, who wants a child and a future Vivian resists; Dr. Victor Stahl, Eleanor’s paternal analyst and only intellectual equal; Dr. Elisabeth Bergmann, a Viennese émigré whose wisdom and warmth draw Eleanor into a rare trust; and Dr. Charlie Beaumont, Eleanor’s gentle husband, whose quiet bisexuality contrasts with her internal chaos.
At its core, the novel examines the architecture of erotic power with a decadent modernist brush. Sensual, moody, and orchestral, it explores how defiance shapes identity, how desire flourishes in shadow, and how secrecy becomes its own form of intimacy. Through Eleanor and Eddie’s entanglement, Secrets of the Velvet Trap interrogates the unconscious compulsion to risk what we fear for what we want.
Published by Tantalizing Tales | Summary of Chapters 1-28 | Chapter List
Tales From the Velvet Trap | Historical Story, Chicago 1929
Tales From the Velvet Trap is a story of dangerous love and self-discovery in Prohibition Chicago...desire, dominance, and the cost of freedom during the roaring twenties. The story of Vivian and Violet is a prequel to Secrets of the Velvet Trap.
Published by Tantalizing Tales | Chapter List
DARKLAW SERIES - EPIC FANTASY
Ambition. Love. Apocalypse. When gods rise, nothing is forbidden. Avestine, a fallen hero turned outlaw, must face her brother’s armies and her own insatiable hunger for power. Driven by dark passions, Avestine can't relinquish possession of the woman destined to end the world, even if it unravels a thousand years of prophecy.
BLOOD DRIES (novella) Avestine fights to master her own ambition, as well as a world fraught with power struggles and dark secrets.
DARKLAW SAGA (novel) An outlaw must conquer not only her brother’s army but her own insatiable ambition. And what of her love for the woman prophesied to end the world?
SAVAGE SINRU (illustrated series) She came into the world like a storm — dark-eyed, cursed, ravenous — to challenge the powers on earth and defy the dominion of demons.
ALL WRITING
ILLUSTRATION
I paint most of the covers for my stories. I'm a digital painter using Procreate, Clip Studio Paint, and Adobe Photoshop. I use an iPad Pro for creating and a desktop computer for edits. I often write about my process on art posts.
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BIO
Author, Artist, Analysand, Academic | Chasing jouissance and embracing transgression | Saketopoulou fangirl | https://linktr.ee/teresa.social
I write about lesbian women who desire and how they experience pleasure. I don't write about women who want to be desired and how they provide pleasure. Desire is power. It establishes subjectivity. It creates sovereignty. That's the niche you'll find here.
The transgressive themes I keep returning to in my stories reflect something essential about how I experience the world and where I sometimes stumble into jouissance, a concept arising from the work of psychoanalyst and philosopher Jacques Lacan.
I am interested in what is felt to be transgressive because it is that experiential excess that will ultimately contribute to the subject's feeling overwhelmed enough for anything new to occur... What makes one's sexuality perverse is not the precise script enacted but the imbrication of transgression with the intensities of the body's libidinal excitability. (Sexuality Beyond Consent by Avgi Saketopoulou) I'm a voracious consumer of contemporary philosophy, history, and psychoanalysis focused on language, power, and subjectivity. My favorite thinkers are Freud, Bataille, Derrida, Lacan, Foucault, Kristeva, Nussbaum, and Saketopoulou. My favorite fiction comes from Dostoevsky, Ursula Le Guin, Marge Piercy, Graham Greene, Fitzgerald, Bataille, and Edgar Rice Burroughs, as well as lesbian pulp fiction, surrealist, decadent, gothic, modernist, and comic books.
----- The images above are portraits the author painted in Procreate. The top three are main characters from the serial novel Secrets of the Velvet Trap: Eleanor, Vivian, and Eddie. The second painting is Avestine and Rook from Darklaw.
The profile avatar is the author with a Gin Rickey in 2024.
