Ah, now this story was the bane of my Wild Wild West projects for literally years. It was supposed to be a continuation of The Night of the Man-Eating House, showing what happened when they found the house in reality, but I stalled hard after the prologue and no amount of praise, pleading, or begging from reviewers could get me to figure out how to work the rest of the fic. I certainly tried many times.
Thankfully, I did eventually get the inspiration to churn out a couple of chapters. After another period of stalling, I managed to get the remaining chapters done as well. Overall it's very short for a multi-chapter story, but it was the best I could come up with and I am quite pleased with how it turned out. And I'm thrilled and relieved to have actually finished it! I believe I first started it three or so years ago.
I think the problem with the story was a number of things, including that I sometimes find it hard to carry a story when it's only in one location. I had the same trouble with Airship. Another issue is that I've often felt that the Man-Eating House episode drags a bit. And perhaps the biggest problem is that since the episode is mostly Arte's dream and I was writing what happened in reality and had the dream be a warning, I basically had to rewrite the whole episode. I don't generally like rewriting episodes; it's very stressful deciding what to keep and what to toss, and how to rearrange things, and basically how to have things make more sense all around.
I knew positively that I was going to have the sheriff live in reality. Usually I hate the "it was only a dream" cliche, but that time I actually was relieved for it, since it meant the sheriff was alive. He was played by William Talman, one of my favorite actors, so in his honor I gave the sheriff William's middle name, Whitney.
One of the things a friend showed me to try to give me inspiration was someone else's idea for a continuation of the episode. Mine was of course very different, but there was one thing I really liked about the other version and I decided I wanted to implement a version of that into my version as well. That one thing was to do something different with Liston Lawrence Day and have him really be good. But I think I still delivered quite a dark and unexpected twist in how I brought that about.
I also managed to work in a reference to Snakes. I had it be that Snakes had operated in the area and was storing a bunch of explosives nearby, which they needed to blow up the house and kill all the infected rats so there wouldn't be any danger of them getting out. Snakes is dead by this point, and Arte comments on he and Jim still trying to sort out who worked for Snakes and what his operations were. Later Arte says he never thought he'd be grateful for anything Snakes had done, but he was definitely grateful for that stash of explosives. I was rather pleased to manage to work in that reference.