“Flowers From the Moon” (Strange Stories, August 1939)

Bloch, Robert [Tarleton Fiske]. “Flowers From the Moon.” Strange Stories, August 1939, pp. 77-86.
archive.org/details/Strange_Stories_v02n01_1939-08/page/n75/mode/2up

A rocket returns to Earth, and Terry is waiting for it. Edna, his beloved, emerges from the rocket and is troubled. Professor Jackson, General Zurrit, and Charles DeVeaux, who appears to be deranged, also exit the rocket, deranged man. The woman says they had a difficult time on the moon but that she cannot talk about it right away. They escape the gathered journalists and go home for dinner where they recount their tale. Their privately funded and designed spaceship worked perfectly. It took three weeks to travel to the moon and three weeks to get hoe. They had two weeks on the surface where they discovered strange flowers. They brought a sample on board, and the scent of the flowers had a terrible effect on them. They began to feel wild, to feel as if they were losing control of themselves. They speculated that the moon was the key, that the legends about werewolves originated in this flower and that the wolves they encountered on the surface of the moon were formerly humans. DeVeaux that night transforms into a wolf and begins to attack them, killing Professor Jackson. Edna and Terry decide that the flowers are too dangerous, they they cannot be turned loose on Earth without putting the entire human race in jeopardy. 

They race back to the ship intending to send it and the flowers unmanned into space to get rid of it forever. Instead, they are pursued by DeVeaux and the now-wolfish Zurrit. They barricade themselves into the spaceship and realize that the only hope for humanity is their demise. They launch into the sky aiming at deep space as they both begin to turn into wolves.

This story is such a fun mix of elements. There is the familiar old lore driven by old books, a blend of history, legend, and science fiction. As Edna explains to Terry:
“Those flowers — I have a theory about them, Terry. Have you ever read those old books in Father’s library? Those ones on witchcraft and demonology he collected?”
I looked up, comprehending. “Yes.”
“He was a serious student of occultism, remember? You used to argue with him as to whether there weren’t actually distorted scientific truths in old superstitions and legends that strangely persisted in every age and every country. He said that perhaps these legends had a basis in truth, and a scientific meaning men just hadn’t learned to interpret yet. And I think he was right.” (82) It is a strength of Bloch that his stories are never one thing, never just shining a small light on an established tradition and calling it a story. What if lycanthropy were actually possible? What might its mechanism be? How could even the most outlandish folklore contain seeds of truth?

Robert M. Price, editor at Crypt of Cthulhu among other professional endeavors, edited and collected Flowers from the Moon and Other Lunacies for Arkham House, which was Bloch’s third collection published by them. This volume presents an eclectic mix of Bloch’s work across several decades. Price had previously collected Bloch’s Cthulhu stories into Mysteries of the Worm, which was published in 1981 by Chaosium.