Before John Vurro ever published a novel, he was stocking shelves and rewinding VHS tapes at his father’s video store in Manhattan. “We would just watch so many movies, and you just start to understand how movies kind of work after a while,” Vurro explained. “I think watching so many movies helped me understand scene arcs and narration, particularly dialogue…I think, in a lot of ways, it did help me in my fiction writing.”
Vurro started out writing poetry from a young age and eventually made the switch to fiction and longer form writing. “As I got older, my poems started becoming more and more story-ish,” he said, “so I started to write fiction stories, and from there, I went on to novels.”
The cover of Vurro’s debut novel, Play, Rewind, published in 2025 through Tortoise Books, features the image of a VHS tape and tells the story of Wes, a young man in his 20s who works at a video store in Queens, New York, while also caring for his mother with Alzheimer’s. “My grandfather had a video store in Queens, which is where the book takes place,” Vurro said. “My family lives in Queens, and I went to Queens College, so I very much wanted to write about Queens because, story-wise, you needed a house, you needed certain things.”
In Play, Rewind, Vurro channeled his long-form writing into a novel based on personal experiences. The grief was his own. “The other part [of the book], the mom part, was basically me kind of working through the grief of my mom having dementia. She passed away a few years ago, and part of that was just kind of writing and dealing with it. It was a very cathartic experience in some ways.”
Vurro’s novel explores illness and Alzheimer’s in an unglorifying way that highlights the real struggles, guilt, and grief that comes along with being a caretaker. “I think that when it comes to illness in movies and most books, they either don’t talk about it at all (the character is sick and they die before the story takes place), or someone is sick, especially when they are disabled, they have this magical quality. I didn’t want to do anything like that; I wanted to show what the real process is because it is a form of grieving. You are slowly saying goodbye, and I didn’t want to sugar coat it.”
Vurro quoted F. Scott Fitzgerald when he said, “We are always writing the same story,” and related it to his own sentiment. “Unfortunately,” Vurro said, “illness has been a really big part of my life; there has been a lot of different aspects and people. I feel [that quote is] true because what you are concerned about is always going to come out, and if you are concerned about two or three things, then that is going to come out in your fiction.”
So far, Vurro has received various positive reviews regarding his work, and Play, Rewind currently has a 4.57 rating on Goodreads from 14 reviews. “The people who have read it seem to have really liked it. It’s been surprising to hear other people talk about my book because you write it and you have one thing in your head, and then people read it and it’s not yours anymore,” he said.
Currently, Vurro is an adjunct professor at Monmouth University, where he is able to surround himself with an eager, passionate writing community. He’s even working on a new novel — one that weaves together threads of Herman Melville and the act of writing, but also has to do with his son, who has autism. “When [my son] was a baby, he was also really sick,” Vurro said. “It really formed my work.” Illness, in its many forms, remains a central concern in his storytelling. “[My work is] very much about getting the realism of illness and trying to keep the reader engaged and reading with really heavy stuff, but at the same time, making it enjoyable too.”
Play, Rewind is available to purchase through Amazon, Tortoise Books, Barnes and Noble, and Target.
Photo courtesy of John Vurro
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