I missed several hours of sleep because I couldn't stop until I'd finished the book, which is as good an indicator as you can get that something is right with a book. I didn't know anything about King's background before, and to discover he came from a lower middle class family, was an alcoholic, a drug user, wrote his first two books while living in a trailer, makes you realize the only thing stopping you from achieving success is yourself. When you think about it that's a pretty negative thing to believe in, as most of use are not quite as huge successes as King is, but it's still way better than the usual "well of course I would succeed if I had this and that and blah blah blah". Only thing that irked me was that first he spends ages telling us how we shouldn't plot the story before writing it, and then couple of pages later tells us how he carefully mulled over a new plot twist he'd invented for a few days to make sure it had no holes in it.