From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
A Complicated Surgery Will Take Place on the Beach Tonight (novel)
This article is about the 2020 novel. For adaptations and the broader franchise, see Beach Surgery franchise. For the embedded unfinished story within, see Beach Surgery (story).
A Complicated Surgery Will Take Place on the Beach Tonight is the 2020 debut novel by C. W. Smith, published by Abrachas Publishing. At approximately 67,000 words, it functions simultaneously as memoir and metafictional archive: a first-person testament in which the narrator—a playwright and development expert—recounts his preoccupation with an outline he has spent fifteen to eighteen years perfecting but never completing.
The novel's structure is irreducibly dual. The frame narrative anchors itself in the author's real life: his workshop on urban play in the desert megacity of Shanbudia, his marriage to a redhead medical intern met at a Street Fighter arcade tournament, and his final, solitary days before fatherhood. Embedded within this frame is the Beach Surgery narrative proper—the outline of a two-day story involving Katita and Leif, divided into two halves and six chapters, set in Newcastle and the rural interior of New South Wales.
The novel's central crisis is the glitch: an irreparable structural seam between the two halves that "does not compute." The Beach Surgery franchise exists, in effect, as the scar tissue of this wound—a vast body of adaptations from manga to opera, each attempting to finish the unfinishable core and resolve the glitch differently. The contradiction between adaptations is canonical.
The novel is illustrated throughout: cover by Kim Jung Gi, end illustration by Kate Nastas.
Epigraphs: Gerald Murnane's The Plains ("The invisible is only what is too brightly lit") and the Street Fighter II manual.