[Zigûr]

If it's Lovecraft we're talking about I think the safest classification might be the one which was used at the time, "Weird fiction", a genre classification which isn't really used these days. It's a sort of blend of horror, fantasy and sci-fi styles from before the genres became as delineated as they are today. If you look at Lovecraft, his earlier Dream Cycle stuff has a very heavy element of what we would today classify as pure Fantasy: a world beyond this world with its own peculiar societies and inhabitants, although they were never extensively detailed. His 'Cthulhu mythos' stuff, by comparison, is more "horror/sci-fi" given that it often involves the horror being of extraterrestrial nature (see The Color Out of Space, The Shadow Out of Time, The Call of Cthulhu, The Whisperer in Darkness, At the Mountains of Madness etc.) while other stories are more pure horror with a more 'magical' explanation for the supernatural elements. His later writings strive to tie the Cthulhu mythos and Dream Cycle stuff together with explanations involving other dimensions and such, returning back, as it were, to the hybridity of 'Weird fiction'.

In my opinion the influence of Professor Tolkien's work is primarily to be found in what is called "High Fantasy", involving imaginary worlds/societies, an epic scale, good versus evil, saving the world, long quests or some combination thereon. I think the overwhelming majority of "High Fantasy" novels contain some element of "Tolkienism" but that Fantasy as a whole is too broad a genre to argue that Fantasy novels in general owe something to Tolkien. I think he codified a very specific sub genre of Fantasy but not all Fantasy. Personally I think High Fantasy is an increasingly exhausted genre; indeed I think it's been the case since Eddings' Belgariad deliberately produced the most generic High Fantasy story imaginable (orphan with mysterious past and group of mismatched friends finds magic device with which he kills evil god) in what was effectively a pastiche of the tropes which had so encapsulated High Fantasy storytelling. It makes things like The Wheel of Time seem utterly irrelevant, in my opinion (outside of the gender issues stuff which didn't need fourteen massive volumes to be explored). As I've said in the other thread I'm no fan of George R.R. Martin but, and correct me if I'm wrong, at least his books (seemingly) shake up some of those very weary tropes a bit.