In this article the authors develop a new method to deal with maximal Cohen-Macaulay modules over non-isolated surface singularities. In particular, they give a negative answer on an old question of Schreyer about surface singularities with only countably many indecomposable maximal Cohen-Macaulay modules. Next, the authors prove that the degenerate cusp singularities have tame Cohen-Macaulay representation type. The authors' approach is illustrated on the case of $mathbb[[ x,y,z]]/(xyz)$ as well as several other rings. This study of maximal Cohen-Macaulay modules over non-isolated...