As punishment, he must stay in the house except as sent by his mother to help their elderly neighbor Miss Volker who Jack meets apparently boiling her hands in a large pot.

Later, a Hells Angel gang member is hit by a cement truck near the Norvelt pants factory after crazily dancing a three-mile stretch from a Mt.

Soon, Miss Volker is placed under house arrest when the police find chocolates, gifted to her by her one-way lover Mr. Spizz, poisoned with 1080 (to kill rodents) in her basement and accuse her of feeding them to the old Norvelters.

The book concludes with Jack being picked up in his dad's J-3 and doing some "bombing runs" with paint-filled balloons on the Viking drive-in theater, during which he decides it isn't that fun and asks to be let down back on the ball field.

[6] One reviewer of Dead End in Norvelt, children's writer Josh Lacey, called it "defiantly political"; one of its messages is "don't forget the narratives of American life that have been neglected or deliberately buried by the dominant culture."

Norvelt was a New Deal town built by the US government to house poor families and named after Eleanor Roosevelt, described by Miss Volker as 'the greatest American woman who has ever lived'.