If I were to break things down into subgenres, I would say this is somewhere between folk horror and dark fantasy. It’s also my first and only work of Romanian speculative fiction, for whatever that’s worth. Regardless, I enjoyed it quite a lot.
Anna is keeping on the move, looking to escape the traumas she has endured. (It’s not clear that anything is actually chasing her, but the demons we carry…) She ends up in a remote and isolated forest village. There, she learns that the village is on the edge of a forest the residents name the Unspoken, inhabited by creatures they collectively call the Whispers, and that no one ever leaves the village. There’s been a stasis between the Whispers and the villagers for a while now, but that seems to be breaking down; the Whispers have taken people, and killed people, in the past, and it looks like they might be doing so again.
What happens is a mix of horror, fantasy, and small-town power politics. Anna as an outsider with an outside perspective, is both welcomed and viewed with suspicion. As the dealings with the Whispers get more fraught and more deadly, she gets more deeply enmeshed in the town’s history and secrets.
It’s dark, and it’s well done, but it’s not perfect. I had trouble keeping most of the villagers straight, and I felt like her friends among them were too quick and too unsuspicious in their embrace of Anna. But this was a solid story and worth the reading.