In January 2008, Cooper was one of the guest singers on Avantasia ‘s

In January 2008, Cooper was one of the guest singers on Avantasia ‘s third studio album The Scarecrow , singing the seventh track “The Toy Master”. In July 2008, after lengthy delays, Cooper released Along Came a Spider , his eighteenth solo studio album. It was Cooper’s highest-charting album since 1991’s Hey Stoopid , reaching No. 53 in the US and No. 31 in the UK. The album, visiting similar territory explored in 1987’s Raise Your Fist and Yell , deals with the nefarious antics of a deranged serial killer named “Spider” who is on a quest to use the limbs of his victims to create a human spider. The album generally received positive reviews from music critics, though Rolling Stone magazine opined that the music on the record sorely missed Bob Ezrin’s production values. The resulting Theatre of Death tour of the album (during which Cooper is executed on four separate occasions) was described in a long November 2009 article about Cooper in The Times as “epic” and featuring “enough fake blood to remake Saving Private Ryan “.